blob: 4a0e33057db41329fc8b141360aaf88ff0820fe6 [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
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000015- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
16 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
17 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
18 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
19 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
20
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000021- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
22 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000023
24- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
25 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
26 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
27 #693195.)
28
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000029- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
30 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000031
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000032- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000033 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000034 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
35 interpreter executions, would fail.
36
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000037- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
38 TypeError. See SF patch #710127.
39
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000040Extension modules
41-----------------
42
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000043- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
44 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
45 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
46 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
47 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
48 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
49 #705836.
50
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000051- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
52 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
53
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000054- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
55 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
56 See SF bug #692416.
57
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000058- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
59 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
60
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000061- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
62 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
63 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000064
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +000065- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
66 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
67 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
68 timeouts to work properly.
69
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000070Library
71-------
72
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +000073- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
74 MS Office extensions.
75
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +000076- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
77 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
78
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +000079- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
80 execution speed of expressions and statements.
81
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +000082- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
83 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
84 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
85 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
86 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
87 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
88
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +000089- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
90 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
91 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000092
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +000093- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
94 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
95 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
96
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +000097- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
98
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000099Tools/Demos
100-----------
101
102TBD
103
104Build
105-----
106
Neal Norwitz2c92c6e2003-02-28 17:24:00 +0000107- Fix build problems when _iconv_codec failed. (SF bug #690012.)
108
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000109- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
110 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000111
112C API
113-----
114
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000115- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.
116
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000117- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000118 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
119
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000120- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
121 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
122 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000123
124New platforms
125-------------
126
127TBD
128
129Tests
130-----
131
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000132- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
133 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000134
135Windows
136-------
137
138TBD
139
140Mac
141---
142
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000143- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
144 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000145
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000146- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
147 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000148
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000149- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
150 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
151 before displaying.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000152
153
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000154What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
155=================================
156
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000157*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000158
159Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000160-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000161
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000162- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
163 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
164 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
165
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000166- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
167 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
168 (SF patch #664376.)
169
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000170- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
171 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
172 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
173 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
174 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
175 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000176 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000177
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000178- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
179 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
180 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
181 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000182 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000183
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000184- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
185 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
186 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
187 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
188 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
189 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
190 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
191 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
192 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
193 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
194 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
195
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000196- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
197 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
198 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
199 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
200 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
201 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
202
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000203- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
204 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
205
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000206- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
207 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
208 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
209 case.)
210
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000211- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
212 passed as unicode strings.
213
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000214- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
215 See SF bug #683467.
216
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000217- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
218 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
219
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000220- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
221
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000222- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
223
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000224- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
225 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
226 arguments.
227
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000228- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
229 See SF bug #667147.
230
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000231- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000232 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000233 See SF bug #676155.
234
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000235- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000236 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000237 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
238 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
239 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
240 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
241 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
242 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000243
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000244Extension modules
245-----------------
246
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000247- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
248 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
249 tp_as_number pointer.
250
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000251- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
252 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
253 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
254 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
255 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
256
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000257- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
258
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000259- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
260
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000261- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000262 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000263 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
264 patch #678531.)
265
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000266- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
267 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
268
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000269- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
270 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
271
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000272- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
273 library.
274
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000275- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
276
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000277- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
278 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
279 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
280
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000281- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
282
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000283- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
284 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
285
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000286- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000287
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000288- datetime changes:
289
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000290 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
291 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
292 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
293 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
294 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
295 now.
296
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000297 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000298 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
299 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000300
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000301 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000302 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000303 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
304 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
305 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
306 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000307
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000308 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
309 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
310 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000311 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
312
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000313 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
314 by a later example coded by Guido.
315
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000316 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000317 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
318 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
319 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000320 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
321 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
322
323 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
324 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
325 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
326 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
327 tzinfo subclass instance.
328
329 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
330 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
331 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
332 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
333 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
334 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
335 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
336 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000337
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000338 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
339 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
340 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
341 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
342 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000343 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
344
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000345 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000346
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000347 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
348 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
349 as a naive datetime object.
350
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000351 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
352 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
353 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
354
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000355 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
356 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
357 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
358 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
359 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
360 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
361 comparison.
362
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000363 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
364 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
365 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
366 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000367 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000368
369 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000370
371 and ::
372
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000373 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
374
375 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
376 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
377 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
378 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
379
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000380 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
381 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
382 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
383 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
384 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
385
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000386 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
387 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000388 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
389 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000390
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000391Library
392-------
393
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000394- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
395 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
396
397- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
398 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
399 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
400 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
401 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
402 See PEP 307 for details.
403
404- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
405 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
406
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000407- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
408 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000409 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000410 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
411 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000412 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000413
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000414- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
415 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
416
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000417- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
418 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
419 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
420
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000421- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
422
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000423- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
424 exception.
425
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000426- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
427 class.
428
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000429- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
430 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
431 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
432
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000433- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
434 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
435
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000436- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000437 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
438 See SF bug #659228.
439
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000440- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
441 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
442 See SF patch #651082.
443
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000444- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000445
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000446- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
447 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
448
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000449- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000450 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000451
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000452- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
453 DOS paths from other platforms.
454
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000455Tools/Demos
456-----------
457
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000458- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
459 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
460 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
461 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
462 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
463 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
464 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
465 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
466 example:
467
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000468 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
469 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000470
471 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
472
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000473
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000474Build
475-----
476
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000477- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
478 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
479 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000480 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
481
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000482 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
483
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000484- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
485 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
486 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
487 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
488 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
489 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
490 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
491 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
492 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
493
494- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
495 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
496 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
497 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
498
499- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
500 from the Tools/scripts directory.
501
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000502C API
503-----
504
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000505- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
506 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000507
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000508- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
509 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
510 tp_as_number pointer.
511
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000512- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
513 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
514 (SF #681367)
515
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000516- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
517 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
518 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
519 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000520
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000521Tests
522-----
523
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000524- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000525 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
526 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
527 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
528 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
529 pydoc.)
530
531- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
532
533- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000534
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000535Windows
536-------
537
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000538- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
539 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
540 time).
541
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000542- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
543 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
544
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000545- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
546 release without strong cryptography.
547
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000548- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000549 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000550
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000551- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
552 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
553
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000554Mac
555---
556
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000557- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
558 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000559
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000560- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
561 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
562 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000563
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000564- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
565 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000566
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000567- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
568 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
569 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
570 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000571
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000572- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000573 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
574 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
575 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000576
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000577
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000578What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000579=================================
580
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000581*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000582
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000583Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000584--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000585
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000586- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
587
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000588- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
589 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000590 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000591 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000592 a different meaning than before.
593
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000594- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000595 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000596 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000597
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000598- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000599 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000600 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000601
602- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
603 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
604 and deallocation.
605
606- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
607 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
608
609- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
610 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
611 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
612 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
613 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
614
615- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
616 now detected by the garbage collector.
617
618- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
619 [SF bug 519621]
620
621- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
622 identifier.
623
624- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
625 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
626 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
627 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
628 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
629 [SF bug 563060]
630
631- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
632 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
633 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
634 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
635 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
636
637- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
638 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
639 not called. [SF bug #537450]
640
641- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
642
643- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
644 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
645 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
646 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
647 state of the slots would be lost.)
648
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000649Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000650-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000651
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000652- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000653 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
654 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
655 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
656 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000657 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
658 Jython 2.1.
659
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000660- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000661 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000662 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
663 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
664 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
665 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
666 these, see PEP 302.
667
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000668- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
669 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
670 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
671
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000672- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
673 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
674 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
675
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000676- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
677 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
678 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
679
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000680- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
681 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
682 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
683 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
684 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
685 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
686 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
687 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
688 releases or implementations.
689
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000690- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000691 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
692 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000693
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000694- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
695 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
696
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000697- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
698 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
699 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
700
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000701- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
702 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
703
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000704- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
705 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000706 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
707 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000708
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000709- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
710 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
711 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
712 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
713 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
714
715 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
716 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
717 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
718 pattern.
719
720 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
721 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
722 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
723 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
724
725 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
726 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
727 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
728 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
729 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
730 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
731
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000732- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
733 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
734 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
735 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
736 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
737 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
738 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
739 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000740
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000741- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
742 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
743 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
744 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
745 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000746 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
747 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
748 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
749 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
750 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
751 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
752 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000753
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000754- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
755 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
756
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000757- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
758 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
759 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
760 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
761 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
762 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
763 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
764 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
765 to Zack Weinberg!
766
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000767- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
768 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
769 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
770 type. This has been fixed now.
771
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000772- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
773 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
774 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
775
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000776- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
777 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
778 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
779 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
780 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
781 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
782 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
783 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000784 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000785
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000786- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
787 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
788 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000789
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000790- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
791 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
792 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
793 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
794 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
795 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
796 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
797 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000798 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000799 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
800 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
801
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000802- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
803 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
804 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
805 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
806 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
807 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
808 this.)
809
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000810- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
811 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000812 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000813 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000814 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
815 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000816 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
817 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000818
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000819- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
820 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
821 currently running.
822
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000823- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
824 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
825 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
826 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
827
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000828- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
829 as directory names.
830
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000831- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
832 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
833
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000834- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
835 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
836
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000837- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000838 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
839 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000840
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000841- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
842 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
843 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
844 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
845 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
846
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000847- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
848 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
849 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
850 removed.
851
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000852- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
853 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
854 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
855
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000856- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
857 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
858 to __debug__.
859
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000860- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
861 string to the left with zeros. For example,
862 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
863
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000864- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
865 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
866 deprecated now.
867
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000868- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
869 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
870 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000871
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000872- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
873 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
874 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
875 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
876 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000877
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000878- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
879 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
880
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000881- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
882 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
883 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000884 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000885 is backward compatible.
886
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000887- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
888 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
889 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
890 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
891 could access a pointer to freed memory.
892
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000893- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
894 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
895 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
896 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
897 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
898 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000899
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000900- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
901 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
902
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000903- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
904 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
905
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000906- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
907 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
908 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
909 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
910 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
911
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000912- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
913 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
914 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
915
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000916- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000917 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
918
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000919- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
920 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
921 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000922
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000923- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
924 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
925
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000926- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
927 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
928 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
929
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000930- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
931
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000932Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000933-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000934
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000935- Added three operators to the operator module:
936 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
937 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
938 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
939
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000940- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
941
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000942- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
943 archives.
944
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000945- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
946 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
947 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
948
949 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
950
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000951- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
952 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
953 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000954 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000955
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000956- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
957 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
958 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
959 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000960 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
961 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
962 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
963 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000964
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000965- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
966 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000967
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000968- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
969
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000970- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
971 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
972
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000973- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
974 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
975 supported.
976
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000977- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
978
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000979- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
980 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000981
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000982- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
983 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
984
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000985- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
986
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000987- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
988 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
989
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000990- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
991 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
992 functions but callable type objects.
993
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000994- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000995 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000996 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000997
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000998- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
999 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001000
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001001- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1002 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001003
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001004- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1005 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1006 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1007 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1008
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001009- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1010 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001011
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001012- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1013 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1014 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1015 and __imul__.
1016
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001017- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001018 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1019 is called.
1020
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001021- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1022 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1023 interpreter was compiled.
1024
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001025- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1026 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1027 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001028 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001029 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1030 1, not 2.
1031
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001032- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1033 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1034 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1035 limit.
1036
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001037- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1038 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1039 bug #623464.
1040
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001041- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1042 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1043 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1044 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1045
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001046Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001047-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001048
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001049- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1050
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001051- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1052 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1053 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1054 with Python 2.3a2.
1055
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001056- os.path exposes getctime.
1057
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001058- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001059 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001060 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001061 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001062 unit tests of floating point results.
1063
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001064- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1065 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1066 has been increased.
1067
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001068- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1069 executed.
1070
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001071- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1072 postinstallation script.
1073
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001074- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1075 test the current module.
1076
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001077- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001078 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1079 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1080 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1081 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1082
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001083- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001084 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001085 Ward's Optik package.
1086
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001087- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1088 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1089 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1090 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1091
1092- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1093 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001094 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001095
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001096- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1097 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1098 shelf are binary pickles.
1099
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001100- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1101 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1102
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001103- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1104 modules are iterators now.
1105
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001106- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1107 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1108 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1109 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1110 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1111 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001112
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001113- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1114 with their entity value.
1115
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001116- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1117
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001118- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1119 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001120
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001121- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1122 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001123 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001124
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001125- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1126 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1127 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1128 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1129 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1130 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1131 main():
1132
1133 import locale
1134 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1135
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001136- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1137 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1138
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001139- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1140 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1141 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1142 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1143 to the new standard.
1144
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001145- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1146 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1147 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1148 an extension to the database.
1149
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001150- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1151 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1152 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1153 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001154 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001155
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001156- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001157 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001158
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001159- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1160 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1161 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1162 bounded integers.
1163
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001164- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1165 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1166 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1167 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1168 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1169 in existence.
1170
1171 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1172 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1173 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1174 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1175 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1176 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1177
1178 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1179 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1180 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1181 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1182
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001183- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1184 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1185 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1186
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001187- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1188
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001189- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1190 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1191 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1192 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1193
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001194- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1195 argument.
1196
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001197- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1198 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1199 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1200 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1201 [SF patch 560794].
1202
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001203- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1204 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1205 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001206 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1207 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1208 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001209
1210- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1211 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001212
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001213- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1214 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1215 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1216 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001217
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001218- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1219 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1220 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1221 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1222 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1223
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001224- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001225
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001226- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1227
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001228- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1229 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1230 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1231 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1232 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1233 identical to None.
1234
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001235- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1236 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1237 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1238 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1239 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1240 results now.
1241
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001242- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1243 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1244
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001245- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1246 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1247 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1248 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1249 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1250 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1251 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1252 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1253
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001254- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1255
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001256- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1257 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1258
1259- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1260 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1261 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1262 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1263 and other systems.
1264
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001265- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1266 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1267 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1268 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 +00001269 work well with these.
1270
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001271- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1272
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001273- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001274 connections.
1275
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001276- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1277 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1278 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1279
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001280- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1281 sets
1282
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001283- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1284 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1285 name.
1286
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001287- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1288 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1289 passed in.
1290
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001291- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001292 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001293 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1294 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001295
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001296- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1297
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001298- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1299
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001300- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1301 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1302 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1303
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001304- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1305 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1306 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1307 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001308 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001309
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001310- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001311 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001312 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001313
1314- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1315 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1316 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1317
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001318- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001319 the value of its expression argument.
1320
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001321- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1322 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1323 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1324
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001325- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1326 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1327 skipstone browser was included.
1328
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001329- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1330 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1331
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001332Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001333-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001334
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001335- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1336 names in addition to accepting file names.
1337
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001338- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1339 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1340 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1341 still used and useful.)
1342
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001343- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1344 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1345 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1346 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001347
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001348- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1349 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1350 the generated binary.
1351
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001352Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001353-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001354
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001355- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1356
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001357- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1358 except in the hands of experts.
1359
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001360- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001361 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1362 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1363 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001364
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001365- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1366 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1367 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1368 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1369 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1370 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1371 builds.
1372
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001373- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1374 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1375 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1376 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1377 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1378 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1379 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1380 new type.
1381
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001382- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001383
1384 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1385 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1386 positive infinities.
1387
1388 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1389 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1390 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1391 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1392 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1393 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1394 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1395
1396 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1397
1398 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1399
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001400- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1401 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1402 size of the executable.
1403
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001404- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1405 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1406 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1407 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001408
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001409- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1410
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001411- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1412 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1413 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001414
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001415- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1416 well as Unix.
1417
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001418- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1419 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1420 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1421 modules in the README file for details.
1422
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001423C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001424-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001425
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001426- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1427 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001428 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001429 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001430 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001431
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001432- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1433 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1434 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1435 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1436 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1437 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001438 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001439 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1440 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1441 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1442 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1443 aligned.)
1444
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001445- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1446 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1447 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1448
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001449- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1450 level.
1451
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001452- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1453 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1454 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1455 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1456 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1457
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001458- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1459 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1460 code.
1461
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001462- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1463 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1464 adjusting for negative indices.
1465
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001466- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1467 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1468 object.
1469
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001470- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1471 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1472 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1473
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001474- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1475 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001476
1477- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1478
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001479- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1480 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1481 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1482 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1483
1484- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1485
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001486- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001487
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001488- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001489 without going through the buffer API.
1490
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001491- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001492
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001493- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1494 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1495 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1496 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1497
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001498- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1499 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1500
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001501- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001502 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1503
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001504New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001505-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001506
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001507- OpenVMS is now supported.
1508
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001509- AtheOS is now supported.
1510
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001511- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1512
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001513- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1514
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001515Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001516-----
1517
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001518- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1519 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1520 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001521
1522Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001523-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001524
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001525- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1526 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1527 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1528 bugs.
1529 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001530 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001531 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1532 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001533 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001534
1535- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001536 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001537
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001538- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1539 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1540
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001541- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1542 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001543 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001544 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1545
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001546- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1547 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1548 use files" uninstall option).
1549
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001550- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1551
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001552- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1553 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1554
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001555- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1556 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1557 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1558
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001559- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1560 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1561 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1562 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1563 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001564 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1565 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1566 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001567
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001568- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001569 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001570 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1571 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1572 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1573 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1574 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1575 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1576 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1577 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1578 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1579 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1580 work around.
1581
1582- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1583 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1584 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1585 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1586 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1587 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1588 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1589 specified with O_CREAT too).
1590
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001591Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001592----
1593
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001594- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001595
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001596- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1597 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1598 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1599
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001600- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1601 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1602 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1603
1604- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1605 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1606 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1607 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1608 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1609 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1610 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1611 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001612
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001613- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1614 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1615 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001616
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001617- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1618 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1619 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1620 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1621 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001622
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001623- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1624 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1625 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001626
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001627- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1628 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001629
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001630- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1631 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1632 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1633 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1634 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001635
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001636- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1637 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1638 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1639
1640- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1641 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1642 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001643
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001644- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1645 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1646 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1647 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001648 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001649
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001650- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1651 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001652
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001653- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1654 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001655
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001656- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001657 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001658 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1659 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001660
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001661
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001662What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001663===============================
1664
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001665*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1666
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001667Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001668--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001669
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001670- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1671 with a custom metaclass.
1672
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001673Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001674-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001675
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001676- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1677 are proxies.
1678
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001679Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001680-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001681
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001682- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1683 very short strings.
1684
1685- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1686 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1687 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1688 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1689 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1690
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001691Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001692-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001693
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001694- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1695 close or delete time).
1696
1697- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1698 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1699
1700- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1701
1702- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001703 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001704
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001705Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001706-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001707
1708Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001709-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001710
1711C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001712-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001713
1714New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001715-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001716
1717Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001718-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001719
1720Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001721-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001722
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001723- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1724
1725- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1726 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1727
1728- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1729 deleted at process exit time.
1730
1731- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1732 in backslash.
1733
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001734Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001735----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001736
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001737- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1738 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1739 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1740
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001741
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001742What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001743===========================
1744
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001745*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1746
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001747Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001748--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001749
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001750- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1751 been extensively updated. See
1752
1753 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1754
1755 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1756
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001757- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1758 deleted!
1759
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001760- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1761 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1762 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1763 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1764 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1765
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001766- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1767
1768 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1769 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1770
1771 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1772 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1773 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1774 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1775 supported anyway.
1776
1777 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1778 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1779
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001780- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1781 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1782 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1783 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1784 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001785
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001786- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1787 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1788 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1789
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001790Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001791-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001792
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001793- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1794 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1795 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1796 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1797 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1798 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001799 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1800 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1801 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1802 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001803
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001804- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1805 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1806 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1807
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001808Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001809-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001810
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001811- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1812
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001813Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001814-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001815
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001816- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1817 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1818 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1819 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1820 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1821 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1822
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001823- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1824
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001825- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1826
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001827- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1828
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001829- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1830 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1831 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1832
1833- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1834
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001835Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001836-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001837
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001838- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1839 off a search on Google.
1840
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001841Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001842-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001843
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001844- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1845 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1846 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1847 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1848 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1849 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1850 other platforms should do likewise.
1851
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001852- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1853 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1854 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1855
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001856C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001857-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001858
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001859- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1860 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1861 producing key-value pairs.
1862
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001863- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001864 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001865 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1866 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1867 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1868 previously went unchallenged.
1869
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001870New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001871-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001872
1873Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001874-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001875
1876Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001878
1879Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001880----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001881
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001882- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1883 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001884
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001885- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1886 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1887 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1888 home.
1889
1890
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001891What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001892===========================
1893
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001894*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1895
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001896Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001897--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001898
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001899- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1900 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001901
1902 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001903 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001904
1905 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1906 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001907 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001908 This needs to be documented.
1909
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001910- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1911 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1912
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001913- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1914 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1915 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1916
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001917- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1918 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1919
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001920- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1921 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1922 class forbids it).
1923
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001924- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1925 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1926 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1927
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001928- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1929
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001930Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001931-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001932
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001933- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1934 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001935 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001936
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001937- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1938 (like 1 + '').
1939
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001940Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001941-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001942
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001943- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1944 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1945 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1946 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001947 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001948 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1949
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001950- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1951 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1952 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1953 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1954
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001955- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1956 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001957 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1958 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1959 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001960
1961- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1962 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001963
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001964- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1965 bytes on its input.
1966
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001967Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001968-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001969
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001970- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001971 convenience function.
1972
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001973- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1974 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1975 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001976 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1977 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1978 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1979 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1980 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1981 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001982
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001983- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1984 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1985 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1986 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1987
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001988- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1989 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1990 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1991
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001992- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1993 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1994 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1995 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1996
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001997- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1998 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001999 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002000 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2001 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2002 new -l and -e options.
2003
2004- statcache is now deprecated.
2005
2006- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2007 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002008 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002009 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2010 time properly taken into account.
2011
2012- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2013 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2014 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2015 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2016
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002017Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002018-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002019
2020Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002021-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002022
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002023- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2024 is built with libdb3 if available.
2025
2026- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2027
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002028C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002029-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002030
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002031- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2032 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2033 PySequence_Size().
2034
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002035- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2036
2037- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2038 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2039 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2040
2041- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2042 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2043
2044- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2045 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2046
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002047New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002048-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002049
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002050- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2051 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2052
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002053- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2054 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2055
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002056- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2057
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002058Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002059-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002060
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002061- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2062 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2063
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002064Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002065-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002066
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002067Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002068----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002069
2070- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2071 removed completely in the next release.
2072
2073- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2074 OSX.
2075
2076- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2077 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2078
2079- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2080
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002081
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002082What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002083===========================
2084
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002085*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2086
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002087Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002088--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002089
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002090- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002091 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002092 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002093 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2094 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002095 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2096 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002097 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2098 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002099
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002100- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2101 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2102
2103- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2104 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2105
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002106Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002107-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002108
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002109- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2110 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2111 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2112 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2113 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2114 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2115 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2116 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2117
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002118- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2119 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2120 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2121 example).
2122
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002123- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002124 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002125 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002126 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002127
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002128- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2129 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2130 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002131 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002132
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002133- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2134 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2135 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2136 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2137 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2138 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2139
2140 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2141
2142 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2143
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002144Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002145-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002146
2147- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2148
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002149- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2150
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002151- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2152 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002153
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002154- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2155 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2156 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2157 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2158 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2159 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002160 attributes.
2161
2162- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2163 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2164 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002165
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002166- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2167 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2168 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002169
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002170- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2171 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2172 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002173 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2174 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2175
2176- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2177 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002178
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002179Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002180-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002181
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002182- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2183 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2184
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002185- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2186 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2187 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2188 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2189
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002190- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2191 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2192 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2193 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2194
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002195 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2196 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2197 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2198 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2199 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2200 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2201 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2202 without losing information).
2203
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002204- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002205 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2206 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2207 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2208 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2209 module).
2210
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002211 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002212 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2213 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2214 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2215 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002216
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002217- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002218 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2219 encoding.
2220
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002221- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2222 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2223
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002224- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002225 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2226
2227- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2228 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2229 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2230 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2231
2232- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2233
2234- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2235 ON, and OFF.
2236
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002237- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2238 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2239
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002240Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002241-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002242
2243- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2244 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2245 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002246
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002247- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2248 been added: -X and -E.
2249
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002250Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002251-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002252
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002253- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2254 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2255
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002256C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002257-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002258
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002259- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2260 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2261 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2262 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2263 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2264
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002265- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2266 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2267 as long) arguments.
2268
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002269- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2270 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2271 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2272 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2273 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2274 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2275
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002276- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2277 input.
2278
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002279New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002280-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002281
2282Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002283-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002284
2285Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002286-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002287
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002288- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2289 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2290 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2291
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002292- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2293 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2294 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002295 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002296
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002297 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2298 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2299 import signal
2300 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002302 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002303 while 1:
2304 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002305 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002306 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2307 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2308 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2309 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002310
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002311
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002312What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2313===========================
2314
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002315*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2316
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002317Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002318--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002319
2320- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2321 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2322 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2323
2324- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2325 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2326 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2327 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2328 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2329 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2330 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002331
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002332- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002333 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002334 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2335 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2336 associate a docstring with a property.
2337
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002338- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2339 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2340 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2341 other built-in object types.
2342
2343- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2344 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2345 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2346 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2347 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2348
2349- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2350 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2351
2352- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2353 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002354 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002355 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2356 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2357 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2358 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2359 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2360
2361- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2362 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2363 class.
2364
2365- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2366 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2367 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2368 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2369
2370- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2371 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2372 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2373 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2374
2375- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2376 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2377
2378- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2379 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2380 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2381 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2382 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002383 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002384 with the same value as s.
2385
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002386- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2387
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002388Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002389----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002390
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002391- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2392
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002393- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2394 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2395 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2396 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2397 objects.
2398
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002399- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2400 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002401 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2402 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2403
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002404- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2405 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2406 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2407
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002408Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002409-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002410
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002411- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2412 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2413 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2414 by the instances.
2415
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002416- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2417 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2418 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2419
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002420- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2421 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2422 before the entire comparison is complete.
2423
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002424- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2425 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2426 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2427
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002428- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2429 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2430 getwriter().
2431
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002432- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2433 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2434
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002435- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002436 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2437 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2438
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002439- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2440 iterable object.
2441
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002442- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2443 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002444
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002445- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2446 authentication.
2447
2448- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2449 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002450
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002451- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002452 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2453 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2454 a sample driver.)
2455
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002456Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002457-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002458
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002459- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2460 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2461 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2462 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2463 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2464 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2465 kernel has large file support.
2466
2467- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2468 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2469 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2470 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2471 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2472
2473- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2474 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2475 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2476
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002477C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002478-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002479
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002480- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2481 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2482
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002483New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002485
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002486- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2487 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2488
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002489Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002490-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002491
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002492- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2493 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2494 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2495 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2496 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2497
2498- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2499 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2500 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2501 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2502
2503- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2504 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2505
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002506Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002507-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002508
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002509- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002510 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2511 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002512
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002513
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002514What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2515===========================
2516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002517*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2518
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002519Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002520----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002521
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002522- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2523 big to represent as a C double.
2524
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002525- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2526 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2527 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2528 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2529 restriction).
2530
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002531- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2532 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2533 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2534 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2535 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2536
2537 >>> dir([])
2538 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2539 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2540 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2541 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2542 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2543 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2544 'reverse', 'sort']
2545
2546 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2547
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002548- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002549 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2550 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2551 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2552 OverflowError exception.
2553
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002554- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002555 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002556 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2557 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2558 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2559 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2560 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002561 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002562 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2563 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2564
2565 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2566 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2567 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2568 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002569
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002570- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002571 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2572 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2573 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2574 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2575 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2576 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2577 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2578 once it is created.
2579
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002580- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2581 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2582 (key, value) pairs.
2583
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002584- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002585 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2586 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2587
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002588- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2589 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2590 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2591 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2592 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002593
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002594- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002595 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2596 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2597
2598 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002600- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002601 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2602
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002603Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002604-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002605
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002606- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002607 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2608 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002609
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002610- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2611 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2612 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2613 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2614 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2615 in this area anymore).
2616
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002617- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2618 threading.Timer.
2619
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002620- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2621 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2622
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002623- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002624 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2625
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002626- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002627 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2628 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2629 converted to Python longs.
2630
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002631- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002632 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2633
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002634- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2635 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2636 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2637
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002638Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002639-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002640
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002641- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2642 division operators as per PEP 238.
2643
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002644Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002646
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002647- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2648 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2649 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2650 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2651
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002652C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002653-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002654
2655- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002656
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002657- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2658 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002659 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002660
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2662 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002663 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002664 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002665
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002666- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002667 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2668 module:
2669
2670 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002671
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002672 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2673 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002674
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002675 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2676 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002677
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002678 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2679
2680 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2681
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002682- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002683 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2684 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2685 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002686
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002687New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002688-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002689
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002690- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2691 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2692 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2693 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2694 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002695
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002696Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002697-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002698
2699Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002700-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002701
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002702- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2703 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2704 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2705 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002706 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2707 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2708 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2709 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2710 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002711
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002712- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002713 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2714
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002715
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002716What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2717===========================
2718
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002719*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2720
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002721Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002722-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002723
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002724- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2725 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2726
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002727- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2728 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2729 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002730
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002731- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2732 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2733 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2734 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002735
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002736- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2737
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002739
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002740Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002742
2743- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002744 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002745 the module docstring for details.
2746
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002747Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002748-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002749
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002750- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002751 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2752 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2753 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002754
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002755- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2756 Nick Mathewson.
2757
2758Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002759----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002760
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002761- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2762 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2763 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2764 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2765 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2766 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2767 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2768 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2769
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002770- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2771 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2772 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2773 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2774
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002775- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2776 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2777 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2778 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2779 come a long way).
2780
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002781- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2782 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2783 write filters for these warnings).
2784
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002785- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2786 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2787 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2788 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2789 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2790
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002791- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2792 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2793 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2794 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2795 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2796 older distribution.
2797
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002798Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002800
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002801- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2802 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002803 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002804
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002805- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2806 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2807 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2808
2809- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2810
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002811- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2812
2813- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2814
2815- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2816
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002817- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002818
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002819- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2820
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002821New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002822-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002823
2824C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002825-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002826
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002827- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2828 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2829 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2830 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2831 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2832 against buffer overruns.
2833
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002834- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002835 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2836 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002837 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2838 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2839 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2840
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002841- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2842 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2843 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2844 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2845 deprecated.
2846
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002847Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002849
2850- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2851 relevant is found.
2852
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002853
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002854What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002855===========================
2856
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002857*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2858
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002859Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002860----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002861
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002862- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2863 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2864 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2865 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2866 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2867 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2868 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2869 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002870 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002871 repaired.
2872
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002873- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002874 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002875 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2876 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2877 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2878 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2879 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2880 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2881 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2882 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2883
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002884- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2885 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2886 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2887 leading BMO character).
2888
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002889- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2890 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2891 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2892
2893 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2894 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2895 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002896
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002897 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2898 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2899 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2900 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2901 for various simple to use conversions.
2902
2903 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2904 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2905
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002906 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2907 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2908 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2909 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2910 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2911 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2912 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2913 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2914 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2915 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2916 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2917 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2918 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2919 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2920 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002921
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002922- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2923 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2924 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002925 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002926 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002927
2928 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002929 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2930 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2931 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2932 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2933 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002934 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2935 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002936
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002937 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2938 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2939 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002940 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002941
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002942- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2943 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2944 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2945 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2946 floating arithmetic,
2947
2948 x = 9007199254740992.0
2949 print long(x)
2950
2951 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2952 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2953 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2954 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2955 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2956 functions are of good quality).
2957
2958 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2959 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2960 algorithms to break.
2961
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002962- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2963 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2964 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2965 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2966 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2967 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2968 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2969 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2970 order.
2971
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002972- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2973 operation along the most common code paths.
2974
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002975- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2976 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2977
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002978- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2979 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2980 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2981 {}.update(UserDict())
2982
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002983- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2984 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2985 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2986 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2987 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2988 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2989 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2990 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2991
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002992- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002993 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002994
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002995 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002996 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2997 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002998 join() method of strings
2999 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003000 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3001 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003002 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003003 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003004
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003005- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3006 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3007
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003008- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3009 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3010
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003011- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3012 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3013 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3014 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3015
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003016- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3017 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003018 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003019 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3020 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003021
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003022- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3023
3024
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003025Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003027
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003028- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003029 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003030 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3031 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3032
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003033- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3034 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3035
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003036- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3037 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3038 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3039 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3040
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003041- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3042 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3043 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3044
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003045- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3046
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003047- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3048
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003049- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3050 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3051 that are still imported into string.py).
3052
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003053- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3054
3055- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3056 Now it does.
3057
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003058- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3059
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003060- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3061 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3062 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3063 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3064 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003065 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3066 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003067
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003068- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3069 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3070 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3071 'help(object)'.
3072
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003073Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003074-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003075
3076- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003077 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003078 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3079 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3080
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003081- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003082 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3083 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003084
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003085C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003086-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003087
3088- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3089 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003090
3091----
3092
3093**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**