blob: 9fe51ada1881d452bf8ed47c2149e93c824a3d10 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000015- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
16 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000017
18Extension modules
19-----------------
20
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000021- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
22 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
23 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000024
25Library
26-------
27
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +000028- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on platforms that set
29 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding, for file names that are not representable
30 in ASCII. (This currently only affects MacOS X; on Windows versions
31 with wide file name support os.listdir() already returned Unicode
32 strings.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000033
34Tools/Demos
35-----------
36
37TBD
38
39Build
40-----
41
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +000042- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
43 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000044
45C API
46-----
47
48TBD
49
50New platforms
51-------------
52
53TBD
54
55Tests
56-----
57
58TBD
59
60Windows
61-------
62
63TBD
64
65Mac
66---
67
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +000068- os.listdir() now may return Unicode strings on MacOS X. See the general
69 news item under "Library".
70
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +000071- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
72 the window manager, false otherwise.
Jack Jansen4213e272003-02-27 22:52:58 +000073
74- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000075
76
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000077What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
78=================================
79
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +000080*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000081
82Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +000083-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000084
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +000085- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
86 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
87 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
88
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +000089- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
90 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
91 (SF patch #664376.)
92
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000093- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
94 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
95 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
96 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
97 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
98 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +000099 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000100
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000101- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
102 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
103 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
104 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000105 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000106
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000107- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
108 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
109 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
110 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
111 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
112 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
113 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
114 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
115 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
116 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
117 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
118
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000119- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
120 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
121 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
122 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
123 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
124 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
125
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000126- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
127 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
128
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000129- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
130 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
131 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
132 case.)
133
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000134- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
135 passed as unicode strings.
136
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000137- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
138 See SF bug #683467.
139
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000140- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
141 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
142
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000143- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
144
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000145- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
146
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000147- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
148 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
149 arguments.
150
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000151- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
152 See SF bug #667147.
153
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000154- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000155 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000156 See SF bug #676155.
157
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000158- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000159 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000160 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
161 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
162 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
163 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
164 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
165 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000166
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000167Extension modules
168-----------------
169
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000170- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
171 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
172 tp_as_number pointer.
173
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000174- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
175 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
176 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
177 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
178 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
179
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000180- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
181
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000182- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
183
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000184- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000185 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000186 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
187 patch #678531.)
188
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000189- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
190 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
191
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000192- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
193 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
194
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000195- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
196 library.
197
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000198- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
199
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000200- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
201 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
202 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000204- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
205
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000206- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
207 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
208
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000209- Fixed serveral serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
210
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000211- datetime changes:
212
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000213 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
214 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
215 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
216 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
217 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
218 now.
219
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000220 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000221 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
222 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000223
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000224 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000225 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000226 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
227 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
228 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
229 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000230
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000231 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
232 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
233 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000234 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
235
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000236 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
237 by a later example coded by Guido.
238
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000239 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000240 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
241 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
242 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000243 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
244 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
245
246 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
247 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
248 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
249 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
250 tzinfo subclass instance.
251
252 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
253 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
254 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
255 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
256 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
257 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
258 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
259 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000260
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000261 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
262 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
263 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
264 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
265 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000266 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
267
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000268 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000269
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000270 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
271 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
272 as a naive datetime object.
273
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000274 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
275 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
276 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
277
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000278 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
279 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
280 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
281 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
282 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
283 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
284 comparison.
285
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000286 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
287 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
288 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
289 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000290 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000291
292 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000293
294 and ::
295
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000296 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
297
298 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
299 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
300 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
301 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
302
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000303 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
304 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
305 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
306 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
307 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
308
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000309 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
310 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000311 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
312 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000313
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000314Library
315-------
316
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000317- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
318 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
319
320- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
321 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
322 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
323 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
324 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
325 See PEP 307 for details.
326
327- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
328 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
329
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000330- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
331 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000332 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
333 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
334 available from the os module.
335 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000336
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000337- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
338 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
339
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000340- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
341 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
342 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
343
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000344- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
345
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000346- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
347 exception.
348
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000349- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
350 class.
351
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000352- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
353 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
354 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
355
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000356- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
357 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
358
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000359- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000360 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
361 See SF bug #659228.
362
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000363- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
364 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
365 See SF patch #651082.
366
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000367- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000368
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000369- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
370 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
371
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000372- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000373 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000374
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000375- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
376 DOS paths from other platforms.
377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000378Tools/Demos
379-----------
380
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000381- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
382 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
383 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
384 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
385 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
386 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
387 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
388 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
389 example:
390
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000391 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
392 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000393
394 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
395
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000397Build
398-----
399
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000400- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
401 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
402 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000403 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
404
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000405 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
406
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000407- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
408 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
409 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
410 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
411 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
412 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
413 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
414 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
415 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
416
417- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
418 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
419 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
420 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
421
422- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
423 from the Tools/scripts directory.
424
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000425C API
426-----
427
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000428- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
429 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000430
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000431- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
432 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
433 tp_as_number pointer.
434
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000435- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
436 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
437 (SF #681367)
438
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000439- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
440 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
441 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
442 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000443
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000444Tests
445-----
446
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000447- Several tests weren't being run rom regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
448 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
449 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
450 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
451 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
452 pydoc.)
453
454- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
455
456- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000457
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000458Windows
459-------
460
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000461- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
462 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
463 time).
464
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000465- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
466 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
467
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000468- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
469 release without strong cryptography.
470
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000471- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000472 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000473
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000474- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
475 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
476
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000477Mac
478---
479
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000480- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
481 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000482
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000483- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
484 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
485 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000486
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000487- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
488 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000489
490- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
491 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
492 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
493 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
494
495- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000496 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
497 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
498 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000499
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000500
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000501What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000502=================================
503
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000504*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000505
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000506Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000507--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000508
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000509- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
510
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000511- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
512 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000513 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000514 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000515 a different meaning than before.
516
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000517- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000518 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000519 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000520
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000521- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000522 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000523 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000524
525- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
526 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
527 and deallocation.
528
529- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
530 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
531
532- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
533 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
534 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
535 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
536 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
537
538- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
539 now detected by the garbage collector.
540
541- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
542 [SF bug 519621]
543
544- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
545 identifier.
546
547- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
548 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
549 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
550 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
551 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
552 [SF bug 563060]
553
554- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
555 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
556 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
557 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
558 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
559
560- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
561 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
562 not called. [SF bug #537450]
563
564- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
565
566- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
567 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
568 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
569 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
570 state of the slots would be lost.)
571
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000572Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000573-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000574
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000575- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000576 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
577 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
578 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
579 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000580 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
581 Jython 2.1.
582
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000583- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000584 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000585 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
586 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
587 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
588 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
589 these, see PEP 302.
590
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000591- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
592 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
593 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
594
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000595- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
596 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
597 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
598
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000599- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
600 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
601 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
602
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000603- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
604 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
605 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
606 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
607 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
608 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
609 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
610 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
611 releases or implementations.
612
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000613- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000614 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
615 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000616
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000617- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
618 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
619
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000620- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
621 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
622 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
623
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000624- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
625 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
626
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000627- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
628 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000629 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
630 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000631
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000632- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
633 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
634 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
635 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
636 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
637
638 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
639 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
640 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
641 pattern.
642
643 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
644 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
645 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
646 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
647
648 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
649 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
650 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
651 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
652 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
653 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
654
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000655- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
656 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
657 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
658 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
659 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
660 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
661 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
662 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000663
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000664- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
665 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
666 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
667 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
668 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000669 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
670 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
671 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
672 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
673 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
674 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
675 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000676
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000677- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
678 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
679
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000680- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
681 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
682 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
683 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
684 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
685 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
686 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
687 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
688 to Zack Weinberg!
689
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000690- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
691 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
692 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
693 type. This has been fixed now.
694
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000695- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
696 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
697 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
698
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000699- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
700 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
701 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
702 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
703 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
704 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
705 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
706 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000707 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000708
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000709- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
710 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
711 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000712
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000713- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
714 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
715 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
716 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
717 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
718 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
719 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
720 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000721 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000722 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
723 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
724
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000725- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
726 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
727 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
728 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
729 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
730 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
731 this.)
732
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000733- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
734 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000735 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000736 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000737 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
738 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000739 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
740 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000741
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000742- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
743 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
744 currently running.
745
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000746- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
747 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
748 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
749 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
750
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000751- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
752 as directory names.
753
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000754- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
755 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
756
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000757- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
758 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
759
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000760- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000761 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
762 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000763
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000764- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
765 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
766 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
767 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
768 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
769
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000770- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
771 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
772 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
773 removed.
774
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000775- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
776 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
777 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
778
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000779- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
780 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
781 to __debug__.
782
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000783- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
784 string to the left with zeros. For example,
785 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
786
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000787- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
788 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
789 deprecated now.
790
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000791- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
792 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
793 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000794
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000795- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
796 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
797 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
798 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
799 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000800
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000801- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
802 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
803
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000804- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
805 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
806 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000807 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000808 is backward compatible.
809
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000810- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
811 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
812 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
813 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
814 could access a pointer to freed memory.
815
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000816- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
817 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
818 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
819 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
820 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
821 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000822
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000823- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
824 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
825
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000826- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
827 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
828
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000829- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
830 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
831 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
832 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
833 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
834
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000835- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
836 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
837 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
838
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000839- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000840 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
841
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000842- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
843 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
844 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000845
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000846- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
847 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
848
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000849- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
850 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
851 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
852
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000853- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
854
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000855Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000856-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000857
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000858- Added three operators to the operator module:
859 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
860 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
861 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
862
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000863- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
864
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000865- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
866 archives.
867
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000868- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
869 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
870 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
871
872 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
873
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000874- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
875 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
876 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000877 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000878
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000879- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
880 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
881 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
882 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000883 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
884 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
885 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
886 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000887
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000888- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
889 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000890
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000891- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
892
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000893- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
894 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
895
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000896- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
897 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
898 supported.
899
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000900- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
901
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000902- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
903 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000904
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000905- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
906 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
907
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000908- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
909
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000910- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
911 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
912
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000913- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
914 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
915 functions but callable type objects.
916
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000917- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000918 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000919 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000920
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000921- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
922 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000923
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000924- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
925 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000926
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000927- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
928 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
929 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
930 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
931
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000932- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
933 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000934
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000935- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
936 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
937 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
938 and __imul__.
939
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000940- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000941 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
942 is called.
943
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000944- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
945 been added where available.
946
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000947- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
948 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
949 interpreter was compiled.
950
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000951- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
952 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
953 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000954 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000955 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
956 1, not 2.
957
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000958- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
959 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
960 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
961 limit.
962
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000963- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
964 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
965 bug #623464.
966
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000967- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
968 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
969 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
970 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
971
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000972Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000973-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000974
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000975- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
976
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000977- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
978 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
979 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
980 with Python 2.3a2.
981
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000982- os.path exposes getctime.
983
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000984- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
985 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
986 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
987 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
988 unit tests of floating point results.
989
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000990- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
991 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
992 has been increased.
993
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000994- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
995 executed.
996
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000997- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
998 postinstallation script.
999
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001000- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1001 test the current module.
1002
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001003- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
1004 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1005 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1006 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1007 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1008
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001009- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001010 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001011 Ward's Optik package.
1012
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001013- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1014 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1015 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1016 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1017
1018- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1019 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001020 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001021
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001022- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1023 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1024 shelf are binary pickles.
1025
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001026- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1027 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1028
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001029- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1030 modules are iterators now.
1031
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001032- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1033 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1034 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1035 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1036 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1037 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001038
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001039- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1040 with their entity value.
1041
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001042- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1043
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001044- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1045 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001046
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001047- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1048 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001049 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001050
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001051- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1052 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1053 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1054 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1055 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1056 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1057 main():
1058
1059 import locale
1060 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1061
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001062- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1063 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1064
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001065- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1066 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1067 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1068 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1069 to the new standard.
1070
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001071- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1072 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1073 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1074 an extension to the database.
1075
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001076- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1077 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1078 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1079 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001080 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001081
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001082- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001083 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001084
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001085- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1086 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1087 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1088 bounded integers.
1089
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001090- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1091 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1092 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1093 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1094 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1095 in existence.
1096
1097 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1098 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1099 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1100 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1101 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1102 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1103
1104 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1105 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1106 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1107 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1108
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001109- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1110 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1111 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1112
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001113- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1114
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001115- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1116 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1117 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1118 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1119
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001120- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1121 argument.
1122
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001123- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1124 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1125 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1126 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1127 [SF patch 560794].
1128
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001129- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1130 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1131 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001132 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1133 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1134 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001135
1136- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1137 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001138
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001139- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1140 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1141 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1142 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001143
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001144- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1145 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1146 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1147 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1148 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1149
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001150- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001151
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001152- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1153
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001154- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1155 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1156 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1157 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1158 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1159 identical to None.
1160
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001161- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1162 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1163 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1164 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1165 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1166 results now.
1167
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001168- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1169 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1170
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001171- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1172 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1173 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1174 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1175 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1176 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1177 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1178 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1179
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001180- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1181
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001182- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1183 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1184
1185- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1186 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1187 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1188 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1189 and other systems.
1190
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001191- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1192 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1193 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1194 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 +00001195 work well with these.
1196
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001197- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1198
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001199- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001200 connections.
1201
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001202- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1203 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1204 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1205
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001206- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1207 sets
1208
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001209- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1210 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1211 name.
1212
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001213- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1214 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1215 passed in.
1216
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001217- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001218 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001219 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1220 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001221
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001222- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1223
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001224- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1225
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001226- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1227 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1228 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1229
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001230- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1231 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1232 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1233 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001234 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001235
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001236- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001237 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001238 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001239
1240- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1241 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1242 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1243
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001244- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001245 the value of its expression argument.
1246
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001247- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1248 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1249 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1250
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001251- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1252 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1253 skipstone browser was included.
1254
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001255- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1256 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1257
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001258Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001259-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001260
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001261- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1262 names in addition to accepting file names.
1263
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001264- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1265 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1266 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1267 still used and useful.)
1268
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001269- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1270 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1271 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1272 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001273
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001274- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1275 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1276 the generated binary.
1277
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001278Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001279-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001280
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001281- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1282
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001283- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1284 except in the hands of experts.
1285
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001286- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001287 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1288 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1289 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001290
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001291- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1292 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1293 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1294 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1295 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1296 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1297 builds.
1298
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001299- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1300 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1301 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1302 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1303 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1304 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1305 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1306 new type.
1307
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001308- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001309
1310 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1311 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1312 positive infinities.
1313
1314 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1315 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1316 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1317 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1318 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1319 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1320 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1321
1322 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1323
1324 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1325
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001326- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1327 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1328 size of the executable.
1329
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001330- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1331 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1332 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1333 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001334
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001335- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1336
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001337- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1338 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1339 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001340
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001341- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1342 well as Unix.
1343
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001344- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1345 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1346 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1347 modules in the README file for details.
1348
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001349C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001350-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001351
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001352- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1353 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001354 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001355 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001356 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001357
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001358- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1359 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1360 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1361 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1362 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1363 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1364 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1365 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1366 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1367 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1368 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1369 aligned.)
1370
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001371- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1372 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1373 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1374
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001375- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1376 level.
1377
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001378- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1379 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1380 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1381 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1382 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1383
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001384- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1385 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1386 code.
1387
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001388- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1389 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1390 adjusting for negative indices.
1391
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001392- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1393 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1394 object.
1395
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001396- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1397 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1398 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1399
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001400- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1401 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001402
1403- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1404
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001405- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1406 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1407 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1408 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1409
1410- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1411
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001412- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001413
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001414- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001415 without going through the buffer API.
1416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001417- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001418
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001419- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1420 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1421 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1422 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1423
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001424- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1425 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1426
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001427- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001428 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001430New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001431-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001432
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001433- OpenVMS is now supported.
1434
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001435- AtheOS is now supported.
1436
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001437- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1438
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001439- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1440
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001441Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001442-----
1443
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001444- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1445 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1446 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001447
1448Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001449-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001450
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001451- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1452 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1453 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1454 bugs.
1455 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001456 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1457 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1458 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001459 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001460
1461- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001462 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001463
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001464- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1465 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1466
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001467- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1468 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1469 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1470 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1471
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001472- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1473 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1474 use files" uninstall option).
1475
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001476- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1477
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001478- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1479 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1480
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001481- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1482 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1483 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1484
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001485- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1486 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1487 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1488 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1489 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001490 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1491 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1492 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001493
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001494- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001495 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001496 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1497 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1498 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1499 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1500 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1501 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1502 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1503 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1504 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1505 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1506 work around.
1507
1508- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1509 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1510 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1511 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1512 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1513 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1514 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1515 specified with O_CREAT too).
1516
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001517Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001518----
1519
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001520- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001521
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001522- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1523 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1524 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1525
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001526- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1527 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1528 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1529
1530- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1531 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1532 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1533 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1534 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1535 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1536 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1537 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001538
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001539- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1540 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1541 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001542
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001543- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1544 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1545 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1546 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1547 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001548
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001549- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1550 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1551 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001552
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001553- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1554 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001555
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001556- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1557 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1558 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1559 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1560 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001561
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001562- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1563 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1564 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1565
1566- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1567 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1568 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001569
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001570- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1571 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1572 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1573 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1574 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001575
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001576- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1577 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001578
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001579- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1580 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001581
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001582- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001583 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001584 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1585 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001586
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001587
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001588What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001589===============================
1590
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001591*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1592
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001593Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001594--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001595
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001596- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1597 with a custom metaclass.
1598
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001599Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001600-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001601
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001602- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1603 are proxies.
1604
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001605Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001606-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001607
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001608- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1609 very short strings.
1610
1611- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1612 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1613 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1614 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1615 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1616
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001617Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001618-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001619
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001620- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1621 close or delete time).
1622
1623- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1624 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1625
1626- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1627
1628- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001629 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001630
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001631Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001632-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001633
1634Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001635-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001636
1637C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001638-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001639
1640New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001641-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001642
1643Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001644-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001645
1646Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001647-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001648
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001649- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1650
1651- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1652 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1653
1654- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1655 deleted at process exit time.
1656
1657- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1658 in backslash.
1659
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001660Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001661----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001662
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001663- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1664 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1665 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1666
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001667
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001668What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001669===========================
1670
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001671*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1672
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001673Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001674--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001675
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001676- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1677 been extensively updated. See
1678
1679 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1680
1681 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1682
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001683- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1684 deleted!
1685
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001686- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1687 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1688 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1689 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1690 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1691
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001692- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1693
1694 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1695 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1696
1697 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1698 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1699 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1700 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1701 supported anyway.
1702
1703 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1704 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1705
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001706- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1707 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1708 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1709 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1710 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001711
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001712- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1713 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1714 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1715
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001716Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001717-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001718
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001719- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1720 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1721 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1722 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1723 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1724 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001725 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1726 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1727 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1728 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001729
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001730- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1731 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1732 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1733
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001734Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001735-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001736
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001737- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1738
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001739Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001740-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001741
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001742- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1743 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1744 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1745 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1746 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1747 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1748
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001749- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1750
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001751- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1752
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001753- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1754
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001755- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1756 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1757 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1758
1759- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1760
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001761Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001762-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001763
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001764- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1765 off a search on Google.
1766
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001767Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001768-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001769
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001770- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1771 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1772 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1773 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1774 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1775 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1776 other platforms should do likewise.
1777
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001778- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1779 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1780 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1781
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001782C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001783-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001784
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001785- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1786 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1787 producing key-value pairs.
1788
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001789- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001790 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001791 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1792 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1793 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1794 previously went unchallenged.
1795
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001796New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001797-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001798
1799Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001800-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001801
1802Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001803-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001804
1805Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001806----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001807
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001808- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1809 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001810
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001811- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1812 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1813 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1814 home.
1815
1816
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001817What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001818===========================
1819
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001820*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1821
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001822Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001823--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001824
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001825- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1826 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001827
1828 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001829 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001830
1831 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1832 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001833 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001834 This needs to be documented.
1835
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001836- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1837 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1838
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001839- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1840 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1841 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1842
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001843- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1844 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1845
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001846- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1847 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1848 class forbids it).
1849
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001850- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1851 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1852 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1853
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001854- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1855
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001856Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001857-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001858
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001859- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1860 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001861 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001862
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001863- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1864 (like 1 + '').
1865
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001866Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001867-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001868
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001869- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1870 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1871 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1872 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001873 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001874 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1875
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001876- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1877 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1878 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1879 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1880
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001881- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1882 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001883 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1884 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1885 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001886
1887- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1888 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001889
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001890- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1891 bytes on its input.
1892
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001894-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001895
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001896- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001897 convenience function.
1898
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001899- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1900 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1901 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001902 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1903 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1904 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1905 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1906 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1907 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001908
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001909- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1910 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1911 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1912 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1913
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001914- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1915 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1916 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1917
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001918- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1919 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1920 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1921 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1922
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001923- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1924 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001925 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001926 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1927 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1928 new -l and -e options.
1929
1930- statcache is now deprecated.
1931
1932- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1933 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001934 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001935 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1936 time properly taken into account.
1937
1938- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1939 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1940 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1941 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1942
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001943Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001944-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001945
1946Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001947-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001948
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001949- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1950 is built with libdb3 if available.
1951
1952- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001954C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001955-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001956
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001957- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1958 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1959 PySequence_Size().
1960
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001961- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1962
1963- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1964 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1965 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1966
1967- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1968 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1969
1970- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1971 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1972
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001973New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001974-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001975
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001976- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1977 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1978
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001979- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1980 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1981
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001982- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1983
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001984Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001985-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001986
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001987- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1988 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1989
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001990Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001991-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001992
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001993Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001994----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001995
1996- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1997 removed completely in the next release.
1998
1999- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2000 OSX.
2001
2002- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2003 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2004
2005- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2006
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002007
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002008What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002009===========================
2010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002011*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2012
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002013Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002014--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002015
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002016- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002017 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002018 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002019 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2020 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002021 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2022 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002023 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2024 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002025
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002026- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2027 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2028
2029- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2030 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2031
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002032Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002033-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002034
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002035- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2036 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2037 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2038 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2039 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2040 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2041 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2042 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2043
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002044- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2045 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2046 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2047 example).
2048
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002049- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002050 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002051 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002052 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002053
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002054- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2055 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2056 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002057 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002058
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002059- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2060 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2061 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2062 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2063 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2064 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2065
2066 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2067
2068 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2069
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002070Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002071-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002072
2073- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2074
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002075- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2076
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002077- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2078 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002079
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002080- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2081 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2082 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2083 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2084 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2085 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002086 attributes.
2087
2088- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2089 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2090 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002091
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002092- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2093 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2094 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002095
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002096- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2097 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2098 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002099 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2100 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2101
2102- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2103 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002104
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002105Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002106-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002107
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002108- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2109 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2110
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002111- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2112 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2113 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2114 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2115
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002116- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2117 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2118 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2119 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2120
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002121 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2122 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2123 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2124 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2125 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2126 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2127 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2128 without losing information).
2129
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002130- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002131 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2132 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2133 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2134 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2135 module).
2136
2137 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
2138 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2139 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2140 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2141 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002142
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002143- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002144 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2145 encoding.
2146
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002147- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2148 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2149
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002150- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002151 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2152
2153- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2154 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2155 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2156 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2157
2158- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2159
2160- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2161 ON, and OFF.
2162
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002163- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2164 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2165
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002166Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002167-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002168
2169- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2170 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2171 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002172
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002173- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2174 been added: -X and -E.
2175
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002176Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002177-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002178
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002179- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2180 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2181
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002182C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002183-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002184
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002185- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2186 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2187 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2188 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2189 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2190
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002191- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2192 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2193 as long) arguments.
2194
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002195- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2196 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2197 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2198 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2199 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2200 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2201
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002202- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2203 input.
2204
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002205New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002206-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002207
2208Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002209-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002210
2211Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002212-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002213
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002214- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2215 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2216 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2217
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002218- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2219 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2220 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002221 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002222
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002223 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2224 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2225 import signal
2226 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002227
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002228 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002229 while 1:
2230 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002231 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002232 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2233 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2234 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2235 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002236
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002237
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002238What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2239===========================
2240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002241*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2242
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002243Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002245
2246- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2247 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2248 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2249
2250- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2251 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2252 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2253 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2254 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2255 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2256 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002257
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002258- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002259 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002260 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2261 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2262 associate a docstring with a property.
2263
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002264- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2265 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2266 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2267 other built-in object types.
2268
2269- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2270 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2271 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2272 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2273 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2274
2275- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2276 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2277
2278- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2279 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002280 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002281 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2282 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2283 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2284 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2285 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2286
2287- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2288 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2289 class.
2290
2291- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2292 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2293 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2294 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2295
2296- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2297 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2298 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2299 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2300
2301- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2302 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2303
2304- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2305 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2306 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2307 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2308 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002309 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002310 with the same value as s.
2311
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002312- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2313
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002314Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002315----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002316
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002317- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2318
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002319- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2320 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2321 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2322 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2323 objects.
2324
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002325- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2326 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002327 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2328 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2329
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002330- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2331 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2332 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2333
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002334Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002335-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002336
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002337- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2338 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2339 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2340 by the instances.
2341
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002342- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2343 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2344 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2345
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002346- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2347 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2348 before the entire comparison is complete.
2349
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002350- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2351 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2352 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2353
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002354- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2355 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2356 getwriter().
2357
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002358- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2359 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2360
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002361- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002362 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2363 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2364
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002365- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2366 iterable object.
2367
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002368- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2369 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002370
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002371- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2372 authentication.
2373
2374- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2375 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002376
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002377- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002378 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2379 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2380 a sample driver.)
2381
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002382Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002383-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002384
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002385- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2386 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2387 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2388 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2389 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2390 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2391 kernel has large file support.
2392
2393- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2394 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2395 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2396 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2397 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2398
2399- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2400 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2401 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2402
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002403C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002404-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002405
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002406- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2407 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2408
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002409New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002410-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002411
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002412- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2413 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2414
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002415Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002416-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002417
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002418- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2419 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2420 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2421 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2422 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2423
2424- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2425 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2426 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2427 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2428
2429- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2430 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2431
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002432Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002433-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002434
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002435- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002436 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2437 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002438
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002439
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002440What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2441===========================
2442
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002443*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2444
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002445Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002446----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002447
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002448- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2449 big to represent as a C double.
2450
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002451- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2452 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2453 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2454 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2455 restriction).
2456
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002457- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2458 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2459 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2460 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2461 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2462
2463 >>> dir([])
2464 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2465 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2466 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2467 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2468 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2469 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2470 'reverse', 'sort']
2471
2472 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2473
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002474- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002475 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2476 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2477 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2478 OverflowError exception.
2479
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002480- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002481 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002482 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2483 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2484 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2485 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2486 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002487 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002488 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2489 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2490
2491 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2492 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2493 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2494 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002495
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002496- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002497 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2498 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2499 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2500 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2501 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2502 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2503 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2504 once it is created.
2505
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002506- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2507 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2508 (key, value) pairs.
2509
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002510- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002511 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2512 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2513
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002514- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2515 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2516 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2517 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2518 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002519
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002520- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002521 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2522 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2523
2524 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2525
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002526- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002527 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2528
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002529Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002530-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002531
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002532- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002533 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2534 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002535
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002536- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2537 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2538 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2539 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2540 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2541 in this area anymore).
2542
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002543- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2544 threading.Timer.
2545
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002546- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2547 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2548
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002549- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002550 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2551
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002552- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002553 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2554 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2555 converted to Python longs.
2556
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002557- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002558 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2559
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002560- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2561 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2562 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2563
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002564Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002565-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002566
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002567- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2568 division operators as per PEP 238.
2569
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002570Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002571-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002572
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002573- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2574 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2575 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2576 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2577
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002578C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002579-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002580
2581- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002582
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002583- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2584 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002585 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002587 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2588 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002589 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002590 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002591
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002592- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002593 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2594 module:
2595
2596 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002597
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002598 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2599 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002600
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002601 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2602 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002603
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002604 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2605
2606 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2607
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002608- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002609 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2610 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2611 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002612
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002613New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002615
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002616- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2617 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2618 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2619 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2620 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002621
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002622Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002623-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002624
2625Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002626-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002627
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002628- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2629 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2630 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2631 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002632 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2633 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2634 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2635 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2636 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002637
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002638- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002639 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2640
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002641
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002642What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2643===========================
2644
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2646
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002647Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002649
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002650- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2651 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2652
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002653- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2654 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2655 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002656
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002657- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2658 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2659 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2660 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002661
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002662- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2663
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002664- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002665
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002666Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002668
2669- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002670 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002671 the module docstring for details.
2672
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002673Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002674-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002675
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002676- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002677 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2678 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2679 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002680
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002681- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2682 Nick Mathewson.
2683
2684Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002685----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002686
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002687- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2688 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2689 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2690 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2691 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2692 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2693 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2694 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2695
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002696- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2697 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2698 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2699 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2700
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002701- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2702 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2703 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2704 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2705 come a long way).
2706
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002707- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2708 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2709 write filters for these warnings).
2710
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002711- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2712 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2713 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2714 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2715 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2716
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002717- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2718 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2719 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2720 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2721 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2722 older distribution.
2723
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002724Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002726
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002727- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2728 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002729 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002730
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002731- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2732 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2733 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2734
2735- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2736
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002737- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2738
2739- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2740
2741- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2742
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002743- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002744
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002745- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2746
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002747New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002748-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002749
2750C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002751-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002752
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002753- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2754 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2755 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2756 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2757 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2758 against buffer overruns.
2759
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002760- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002761 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2762 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002763 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2764 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2765 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2766
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002767- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2768 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2769 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2770 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2771 deprecated.
2772
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002773Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002775
2776- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2777 relevant is found.
2778
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002779
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002780What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002781===========================
2782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002783*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2784
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002785Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002787
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002788- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2789 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2790 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2791 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2792 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2793 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2794 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2795 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002796 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002797 repaired.
2798
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002799- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002800 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002801 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2802 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2803 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2804 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2805 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2806 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2807 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2808 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2809
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002810- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2811 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2812 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2813 leading BMO character).
2814
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002815- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2816 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2817 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2818
2819 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2820 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2821 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002822
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002823 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2824 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2825 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2826 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2827 for various simple to use conversions.
2828
2829 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2830 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2831
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002832 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2833 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2834 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2835 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2836 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2837 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2838 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2839 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2840 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2841 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2842 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2843 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2844 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2845 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2846 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002847
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002848- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2849 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2850 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002851 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002852 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002853
2854 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002855 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2856 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2857 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2858 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2859 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002860 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2861 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002862
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002863 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2864 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2865 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002866 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002867
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002868- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2869 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2870 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2871 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2872 floating arithmetic,
2873
2874 x = 9007199254740992.0
2875 print long(x)
2876
2877 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2878 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2879 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2880 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2881 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2882 functions are of good quality).
2883
2884 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2885 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2886 algorithms to break.
2887
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002888- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2889 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2890 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2891 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2892 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2893 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2894 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2895 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2896 order.
2897
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002898- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2899 operation along the most common code paths.
2900
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002901- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2902 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2903
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002904- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2905 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2906 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2907 {}.update(UserDict())
2908
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002909- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2910 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2911 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2912 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2913 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2914 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2915 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2916 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2917
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002918- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002919 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002920
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002921 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002922 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2923 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002924 join() method of strings
2925 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002926 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2927 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002929 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002930
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002931- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2932 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2933
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002934- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2935 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2936
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002937- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2938 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2939 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2940 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2941
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002942- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2943 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002944 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002945 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2946 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002947
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002948- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2949
2950
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002951Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002952-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002953
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002954- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002955 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002956 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2957 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2958
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002959- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2960 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2961
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002962- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2963 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2964 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2965 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2966
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002967- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2968 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2969 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2970
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002971- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2972
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002973- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2974
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002975- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2976 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2977 that are still imported into string.py).
2978
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002979- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2980
2981- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2982 Now it does.
2983
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002984- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2985
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002986- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2987 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2988 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2989 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2990 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002991 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2992 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002993
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002994- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2995 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2996 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2997 'help(object)'.
2998
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002999Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003001
3002- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003003 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003004 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3005 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3006
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003007- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003008 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3009 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003010
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003011C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003012-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003013
3014- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3015 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016
3017----
3018
3019**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**