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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000015- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
16
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000017- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
18 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
19 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
20 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
21 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
22 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
23 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
24 records with equal keys is unchanged).
25
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000026- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
27 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000028
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000029- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
30 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
31 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
32
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000033- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
34 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
35 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
36 freelist.
37
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000038- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
39 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
40
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000041- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
42 number.
43
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000044- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
45 a TypeError exception.
46
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000047- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
48 820195.
49
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000050- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
51 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
52 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
53
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000054Extension modules
55-----------------
56
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +000057- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
58 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
59 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
60
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +000061- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
62
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000063- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
64
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000065- readline.clear_history was added.
66
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000067- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
68
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000069- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
70
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000071- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
72
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000073- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
74
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000075- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
76
77- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
78
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +000079- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
80
81- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
82
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +000083- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
84 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
85 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
86
87- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
88 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
89 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
90 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
91 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
92 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
93 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
94
95- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
96 iterators from a single iterable.
97
98- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
99 of raising a TypeError exception.
100
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000101Library
102-------
103
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000104- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
105
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000106- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
107
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000108- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
109
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000110- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
111
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000112- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
113 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
114 list of fieldnames.
115
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000116- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
117 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
118
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000119- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
120
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000121- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
122 empty lists.
123
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000124- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
125 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
126 and shelves.
127
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000128- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
129 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
130
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000131- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000132 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
133 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000134
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000135- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
136 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
137 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
138 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000139
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000140- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000141 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
142 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
143
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000144- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
145 and removed in Py2.4.
146
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000147Tools/Demos
148-----------
149
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000150- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
151
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000152- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
153 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
154 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
155 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
156
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000157- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
158
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000159- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
160 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
161 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
162 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
163 now.
164
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000165- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
166 in effect
167
168- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
169 C-c C-h
170
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000171- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
172 -d option was given.
173
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000174Build
175-----
176
177C API
178-----
179
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000180- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
181 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
182
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000183- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
184 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
185 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
186 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
187
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000188New platforms
189-------------
190
191Tests
192-----
193
194Windows
195-------
196
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000197- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
198 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
199 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
200
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000201Mac
202----
203
204
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000205What's New in Python 2.3 final?
206===============================
207
208*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
209
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000210IDLE
211----
212
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000213- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
214 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
215 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
216 context-menu actions.
217
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000218- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
219 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
220 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
221 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
222 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
223 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
224 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
225 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
226 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
227
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000228
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000229What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
230=============================================
231
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000232*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000233
234Core and builtins
235-----------------
236
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000237- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000238 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000239 comment at the end are still unsupported.
240
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000241Extension modules
242-----------------
243
244- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
245 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
246 than once. This has been fixed.
247
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000248- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
249 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
250 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
251 call.
252
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000253- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
254
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000255Library
256-------
257
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000258- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
259 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
260
261- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
262 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
263 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
264 restored.
265
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000266IDLE
267----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000268
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000269- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000270
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000271Build
272-----
273
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000274- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
275 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
276
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000277C API
278-----
279
280Windows
281-------
282
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000283- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
284 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
285
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000286- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
287
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000288Mac
289---
290
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000291- Various fixes to pimp.
292
293- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
294
295- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
296 more problems than it solves.
297
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000298
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000299What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
300=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000301
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000302*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
303
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000304Core and builtins
305-----------------
306
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000307- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
308 by sys.setcheckinterval().
309
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000310- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
311 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000312 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000313
314- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
315 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
316 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000317 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000318
319- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
320 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000321
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000322- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
323 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
324 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
325
326- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000327 770247.
328
329- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000330
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000331Extension modules
332-----------------
333
334- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
335 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
336
337- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
338
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000339- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
340
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000341- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
342 contained within the _strptime module.
343
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000344- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
345 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
346
347- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000348 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
349
350- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
351 the find_class attribute, if present.
352
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000353- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000354
355 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
356 (SF bug 763298).
357
358 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000359 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
360 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
361 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000362
363 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
364
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000365Library
366-------
367
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000368- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
369
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000370- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
371 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
372 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
373 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
374 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
375 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
376 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
377 or Tester().
378
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000379- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
380 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
381 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
382 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
383 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
384 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
385 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
386 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
387 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000388
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000389 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000390
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000391- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
392 weren't before was an oversight.
393
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000394- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
395 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
396
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000397- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
398 when there are no lines.
399
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000400- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
401 which could occur with Tk 8.4
402
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000403- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
404 to child processes.
405
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000406- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
407
408- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
409
410- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
411 xmlrpclib.
412
413- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
414 responses.
415
416- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
417 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
418
419- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
420 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
421 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
422
423- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
424 used as patterns.
425
426- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
427 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
428 than Tk 8.3.
429
430- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
431
432- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000433
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000434Tools/Demos
435-----------
436
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000437- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
438
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000439- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
440
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000441- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000442
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000443Build
444-----
445
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000446- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
447
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000448- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
449
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000450- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
451 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000452
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000453- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
454 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
455 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000456
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000457C API
458-----
459
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000460- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
461 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
462
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000463Windows
464-------
465
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000466- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
467 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
468 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
469 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
470 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
471 Python exception ::
472
473 thread.error: can't start new thread
474
475 is raised now.
476
477- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
478 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
479 instead of from DLL teardown.
480
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000481Mac
482---
483
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000484- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000485 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000486 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
487 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
488 the executable in the bundle.
489
490- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000491
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000492- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
493
494- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
495 on Panther.
496
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000497What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
498================================
499
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000500*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000501
502Core and builtins
503-----------------
504
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000505- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
506 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
507 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
508 with the -i option.
509
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000510- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
511 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
512
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000513- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
514 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
515
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000516- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
517 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
518 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
519 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
520 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
521 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
522 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
523 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
524 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
525 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
526 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
527 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
528 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000529
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000530- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
531 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
532 embedded in a lambda expression.
533
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000534- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
535 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
536 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
537 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
538 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
539
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000540- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
541 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
542 matches the restriction on classic classes.
543
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000544- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
545 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
546
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000547- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
548 It's writable again.
549
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000550- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
551 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
552 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000553 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000554
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000555- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
556 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
557 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
558
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000559Extension modules
560-----------------
561
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000562- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
563 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
564
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000565- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
566 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
567 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
568 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
569
570- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
571 collection.
572
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000573- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
574 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
575 unique within a single program run.
576
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000577- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
578 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
579
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000580- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
581 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
582
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000583- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
584 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000585
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000586- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
587
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000588- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
589 Fixes SF bug #730685.
590
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000591- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
592 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
593 for many BSD-derived systems.
594
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000595
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000596Library
597-------
598
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000599- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
600 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
601 primary ones:
602
603 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
604 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
605 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
606
607 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
608 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
609 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
610 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
611 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
612 framework features (which doctest lacks).
613
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000614- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
615 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
616 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
617 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
618 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
619 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
620 argument.
621
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000622- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
623 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
624 in the archive.
625
626- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
627 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
628
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000629- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
630 569574).
631
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000632- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
633 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
634 no more.
635
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000636- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
637 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
638 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
639 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
640 code coverage.
641
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000642- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
643 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
644 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000645 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
646 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000647
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000648- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
649 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
650 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000651 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000652
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000653- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
654
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000655- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
656 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
657 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
658 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
659
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000660- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
661 handling.
662
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000663- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
664 __doc__ of data descriptors.
665
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000666- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
667 in socket.py.
668
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000669- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
670
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000671- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
672 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
673 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
674 opener with proxy support.
675
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000676- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
677
678- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
679
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000680Tools/Demos
681-----------
682
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000683- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
684
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000685- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
686
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000687- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
688 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000689
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000690- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
691 files.
692
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000693Build
694-----
695
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000696- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000697 different root directory.
698
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000699C API
700-----
701
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000702- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
703 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
704 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
705 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
706 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
707 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
708 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
709 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
710 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
711 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
712
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000713- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
714 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
715 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
716 from Python.
717
718
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000719New platforms
720-------------
721
722None this time.
723
724Tests
725-----
726
727- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
728 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
729
730Windows
731-------
732
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000733- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
734
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000735- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
736 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
737 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
738 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
739 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
740 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
741 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
742 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
743 that's what it's for.
744
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000745Mac
746---
747
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000748- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
749 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
750 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
751 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000752- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
753 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
754- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000755
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000756SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
757------------------------------------
758
759430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
760598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
761622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
762661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
763683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
764697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
765713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
766724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
767727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
768729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
769730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
770731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
771732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
772733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
773735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
774740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
775744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
776745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
777747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
778749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
779751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
780753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
781755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
782757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
783760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
784
785
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000786What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
787================================
788
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000789*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000790
791Core and builtins
792-----------------
793
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000794- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
795 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
796
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000797- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
798 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
799 and cannot be strings).
800
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000801- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
802 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
803 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
804 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
805
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000806- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
807 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
808 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
809 Python itself.
810
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000811- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
812 the referenced object, if it has one.
813
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000814- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
815 the thread started at
816 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
817
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000818- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
819 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
820 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
821 placed on a list index.
822
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000823- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
824 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
825 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
826 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
827
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000828- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
829 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
830 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
831 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
832 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
833 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
834 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
835
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000836- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
837 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
838 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
839 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
840 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
841
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000842- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
843 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000844
845- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
846 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
847 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
848 #693195.)
849
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000850- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
851 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000852
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000853- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000854 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000855 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
856 interpreter executions, would fail.
857
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000858- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000859 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000860 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000861
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000862Extension modules
863-----------------
864
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000865- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
866 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
867 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
868 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
869
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000870- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
871 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
872
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000873- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
874 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
875 and Greg Chapman.)
876
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000877- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
878 recursively.
879
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000880- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000881 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
882 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
883 leaks.
884
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000885- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
886
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000887- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
888 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
889 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
890 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
891 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
892 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
893 #705836.
894
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000895- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000896 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
897
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000898- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
899 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
900 See SF bug #692416.
901
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000902- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
903 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
904
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000905- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
906 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
907 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000908
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000909- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000910 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
911 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
912
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000913- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
914 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
915 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
916 timeouts to work properly.
917
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000918Library
919-------
920
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000921- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
922 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
923 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
924 future release.
925
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000926- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
927 for querying platform dependent features.
928
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000929- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000930
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000931- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
932 pickle protocol versions.
933
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000934- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
935 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
936 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
937
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000938- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
939
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000940- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
941 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
942 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
943 modules.
944
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000945- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
946 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
947 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
948
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000949- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
950 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
951
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000952- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
953 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
954 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
955
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000956- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000957 MS Office extensions.
958
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000959- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
960 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
961
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000962- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
963 execution speed of expressions and statements.
964
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000965- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
966 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
967 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
968 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
969 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
970 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
971
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000972- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
973 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
974 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000975
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000976- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
977 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
978 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
979
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000980- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
981
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000982- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
983 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
984 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
985
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000986Tools/Demos
987-----------
988
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000989- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
990 See the module docstring for details.
991
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000992Build
993-----
994
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000995- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
996 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000997
998C API
999-----
1000
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001001- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1002
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001003- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1004 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1005 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1006
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001007- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1008 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001009
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001010 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1011 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1012 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001013
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001014- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001015 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1016
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001017- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1018 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1019 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001020
1021New platforms
1022-------------
1023
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001024None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001025
1026Tests
1027-----
1028
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001029- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1030 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001031
1032Windows
1033-------
1034
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001035- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1036 function.
1037
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001038- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1039 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001040
1041Mac
1042---
1043
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001044- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1045 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001046
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001047- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1048 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001049
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001050- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1051 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1052 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001053
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001054- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001055 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1056 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001057
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001058- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1059 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001060
1061
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001062What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1063=================================
1064
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001065*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001066
1067Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001068-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001069
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001070- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1071 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1072 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1073
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001074- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1075 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1076 (SF patch #664376.)
1077
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001078- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1079 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1080 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1081 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1082 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1083 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001084 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001085
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001086- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1087 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1088 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1089 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001090 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001091
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001092- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1093 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1094 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1095 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1096 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1097 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1098 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1099 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1100 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1101 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1102 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1103
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001104- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1105 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1106 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1107 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1108 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1109 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1110
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001111- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1112 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1113
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001114- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1115 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1116 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1117 case.)
1118
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001119- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1120 passed as unicode strings.
1121
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001122- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1123 See SF bug #683467.
1124
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001125- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1126 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1127
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001128- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1129
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001130- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1131
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001132- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1133 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1134 arguments.
1135
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001136- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1137 See SF bug #667147.
1138
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001139- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001140 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001141 See SF bug #676155.
1142
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001143- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001144 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001145 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1146 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1147 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1148 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1149 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1150 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001151
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001152Extension modules
1153-----------------
1154
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001155- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1156 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1157 tp_as_number pointer.
1158
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001159- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1160 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1161 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1162 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1163 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1164
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001165- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1166
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001167- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1168
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001169- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001170 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001171 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1172 patch #678531.)
1173
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001174- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1175 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1176
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001177- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1178 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1179
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001180- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1181
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001182- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1183 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1184 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1185
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001186- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1187
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001188- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1189 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1190
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001191- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001192
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001193- datetime changes:
1194
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001195 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1196
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001197 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1198 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1199 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1200 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1201 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1202 now.
1203
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001204 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001205 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1206 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001207
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001208 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001209 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001210 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1211 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1212 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1213 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001214
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001215 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1216 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1217 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001218 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1219
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001220 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1221 by a later example coded by Guido.
1222
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001223 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001224 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1225 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1226 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001227 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1228 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1229
1230 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1231 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1232 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1233 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1234 tzinfo subclass instance.
1235
1236 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1237 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1238 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1239 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1240 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1241 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1242 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1243 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001244
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001245 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1246 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1247 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1248 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1249 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001250 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1251
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001252 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001253
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001254 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1255 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1256 as a naive datetime object.
1257
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001258 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1259 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1260 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1261
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001262 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1263 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1264 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1265 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1266 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1267 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1268 comparison.
1269
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001270 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1271 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1272 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1273 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001274 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001275
1276 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001277
1278 and ::
1279
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001280 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1281
1282 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1283 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1284 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1285 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1286
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001287 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1288 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1289 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1290 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1291 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1292
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001293 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1294 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001295 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1296 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001297
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001298Library
1299-------
1300
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001301- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1302 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1303
1304- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1305 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1306 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1307 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1308 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1309 See PEP 307 for details.
1310
1311- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1312 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1313
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001314- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1315 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001316 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001317 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1318 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001319 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001320
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001321- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1322 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1323
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001324- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1325 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1326 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1327
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001328- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1329
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001330- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1331 exception.
1332
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001333- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1334 class.
1335
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001336- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1337 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1338 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1339
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001340- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1341 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1342
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001343- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001344 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1345 See SF bug #659228.
1346
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001347- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1348 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1349 See SF patch #651082.
1350
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001351- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001352
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001353- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1354 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1355
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001356- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001357 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001358
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001359- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1360 DOS paths from other platforms.
1361
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001362Tools/Demos
1363-----------
1364
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001365- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1366 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1367 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1368 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1369 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1370 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1371 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1372 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1373 example:
1374
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001375 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1376 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001377
1378 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1379
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001380
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001381Build
1382-----
1383
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001384- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1385 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1386 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001387 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1388
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001389 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1390
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001391- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1392 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1393 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1394 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1395 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1396 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1397 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1398 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1399 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1400
1401- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1402 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1403 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1404 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1405
1406- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1407 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1408
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001409C API
1410-----
1411
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001412- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1413 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001414
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001415- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1416 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1417 tp_as_number pointer.
1418
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001419- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1420 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1421 (SF #681367)
1422
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001423- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1424 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1425 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1426 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001427
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001428Tests
1429-----
1430
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001431- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001432 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1433 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1434 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1435 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1436 pydoc.)
1437
1438- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1439
1440- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001441
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001442Windows
1443-------
1444
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001445- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1446 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1447 time).
1448
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001449- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1450 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1451
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001452- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1453 release without strong cryptography.
1454
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001455- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001456 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001457
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001458- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1459 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001461Mac
1462---
1463
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001464- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1465 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001466
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001467- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1468 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1469 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001470
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001471- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1472 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001473
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001474- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1475 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1476 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1477 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001478
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001479- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001480 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1481 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1482 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001483
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001484
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001485What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001486=================================
1487
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001488*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001489
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001490Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001491--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001492
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001493- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1494
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001495- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1496 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001497 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001498 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001499 a different meaning than before.
1500
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001501- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001502 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001503 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001504
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001505- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001506 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001507 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001508
1509- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1510 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1511 and deallocation.
1512
1513- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1514 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1515
1516- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1517 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1518 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1519 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1520 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1521
1522- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1523 now detected by the garbage collector.
1524
1525- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1526 [SF bug 519621]
1527
1528- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1529 identifier.
1530
1531- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1532 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1533 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1534 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1535 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1536 [SF bug 563060]
1537
1538- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1539 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1540 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1541 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1542 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1543
1544- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1545 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1546 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1547
1548- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1549
1550- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1551 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1552 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1553 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1554 state of the slots would be lost.)
1555
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001556Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001557-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001558
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001559- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001560 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1561 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1562 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1563 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001564 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1565 Jython 2.1.
1566
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001567- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001568 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001569 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1570 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1571 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1572 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1573 these, see PEP 302.
1574
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001575- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1576 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1577 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1578
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001579- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1580 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1581 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1582
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001583- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1584 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1585 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1586
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001587- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1588 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1589 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1590 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1591 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1592 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1593 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1594 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1595 releases or implementations.
1596
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001597- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001598 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1599 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001600
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001601- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1602 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1603
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001604- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1605 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1606 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1607
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001608- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1609 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1610
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001611- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1612 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001613 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1614 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001615
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001616- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1617 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1618 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1619 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1620 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1621
1622 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1623 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1624 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1625 pattern.
1626
1627 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1628 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1629 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1630 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1631
1632 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1633 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1634 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1635 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1636 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1637 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1638
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001639- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1640 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1641 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1642 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1643 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1644 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1645 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1646 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001647
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001648- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1649 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1650 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1651 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1652 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001653 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1654 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1655 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1656 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1657 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1658 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1659 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001660
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001661- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1662 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1663
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001664- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1665 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1666 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1667 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1668 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1669 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1670 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1671 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1672 to Zack Weinberg!
1673
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001674- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1675 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1676 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1677 type. This has been fixed now.
1678
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001679- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1680 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1681 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1682
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001683- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1684 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1685 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1686 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1687 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1688 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1689 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1690 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001691 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001692
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001693- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1694 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1695 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001696
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001697- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1698 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1699 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1700 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1701 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1702 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1703 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1704 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001705 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001706 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1707 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1708
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001709- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1710 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1711 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1712 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1713 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1714 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1715 this.)
1716
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001717- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1718 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001719 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001720 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001721 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1722 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001723 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1724 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001725
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001726- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1727 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1728 currently running.
1729
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001730- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1731 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1732 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1733 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1734
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001735- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1736 as directory names.
1737
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001738- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1739 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1740
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001741- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1742 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1743
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001744- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001745 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1746 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001747
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001748- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1749 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1750 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1751 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1752 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1753
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001754- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1755 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1756 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1757 removed.
1758
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001759- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1760 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1761 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1762
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001763- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1764 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1765 to __debug__.
1766
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001767- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1768 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1769 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1770
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001771- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1772 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1773 deprecated now.
1774
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001775- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1776 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1777 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001778
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001779- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1780 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1781 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1782 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1783 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001784
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001785- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1786 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1787
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001788- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1789 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1790 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001791 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001792 is backward compatible.
1793
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001794- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1795 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1796 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1797 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1798 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1799
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001800- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1801 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1802 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1803 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1804 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1805 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001806
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001807- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1808 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1809
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001810- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1811 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1812
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001813- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1814 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1815 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1816 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1817 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1818
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001819- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1820 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1821 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1822
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001823- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001824 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1825
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001826- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1827 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1828 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001829
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001830- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1831 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1832
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001833- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1834 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1835 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1836
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001837- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1838
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001839Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001840-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001841
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001842- Added three operators to the operator module:
1843 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1844 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1845 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1846
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001847- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1848
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001849- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1850 archives.
1851
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001852- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1853 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1854 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1855
1856 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1857
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001858- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1859 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1860 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001861 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001862
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001863- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1864 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1865 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1866 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001867 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1868 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1869 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1870 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001871
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001872- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1873 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001874
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001875- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1876
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001877- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1878 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1879
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001880- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1881 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1882 supported.
1883
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001884- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1885
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001886- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1887 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001888
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001889- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1890 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1891
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001892- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1893
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001894- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1895 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1896
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001897- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1898 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1899 functions but callable type objects.
1900
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001901- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001902 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001903 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001904
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001905- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1906 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001907
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001908- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1909 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001910
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001911- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1912 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1913 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1914 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1915
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001916- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1917 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001918
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001919- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1920 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1921 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1922 and __imul__.
1923
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001924- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001925 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1926 is called.
1927
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001928- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1929 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1930 interpreter was compiled.
1931
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001932- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1933 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1934 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001935 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001936 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1937 1, not 2.
1938
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001939- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1940 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1941 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1942 limit.
1943
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001944- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1945 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1946 bug #623464.
1947
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001948- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1949 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1950 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1951 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1952
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001953Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001954-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001955
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001956- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1957
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001958- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1959 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1960 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1961 with Python 2.3a2.
1962
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001963- os.path exposes getctime.
1964
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001965- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001966 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001967 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001968 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001969 unit tests of floating point results.
1970
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001971- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1972 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1973 has been increased.
1974
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001975- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1976 executed.
1977
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001978- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1979 postinstallation script.
1980
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001981- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1982 test the current module.
1983
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001984- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001985 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1986 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1987 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1988 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1989
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001990- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001991 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001992 Ward's Optik package.
1993
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001994- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1995 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1996 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1997 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1998
1999- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2000 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002001 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002002
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002003- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2004 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2005 shelf are binary pickles.
2006
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002007- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2008 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2009
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002010- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2011 modules are iterators now.
2012
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002013- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2014 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2015 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2016 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2017 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2018 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002019
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002020- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2021 with their entity value.
2022
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002023- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2024
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002025- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2026 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002027
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002028- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2029 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002030 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002031
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002032- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2033 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2034 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2035 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2036 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2037 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2038 main():
2039
2040 import locale
2041 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2042
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002043- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2044 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2045
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002046- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2047 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2048 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2049 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2050 to the new standard.
2051
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002052- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2053 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2054 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2055 an extension to the database.
2056
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002057- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2058 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2059 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2060 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002061 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002062
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002063- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002064 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002065
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002066- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2067 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2068 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2069 bounded integers.
2070
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002071- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2072 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2073 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2074 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2075 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2076 in existence.
2077
2078 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2079 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2080 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2081 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2082 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2083 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2084
2085 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2086 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2087 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2088 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2089
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002090- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2091 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2092 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2093
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002094- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2095
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002096- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2097 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2098 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2099 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2100
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002101- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2102 argument.
2103
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002104- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2105 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2106 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2107 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2108 [SF patch 560794].
2109
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002110- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2111 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2112 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002113 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2114 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2115 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002116
2117- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2118 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002119
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002120- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2121 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2122 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2123 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002124
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002125- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2126 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2127 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2128 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2129 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2130
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002131- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002132
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002133- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2134
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002135- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2136 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2137 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2138 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2139 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2140 identical to None.
2141
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002142- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2143 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2144 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2145 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2146 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2147 results now.
2148
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002149- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2150 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2151
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002152- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2153 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2154 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2155 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2156 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2157 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2158 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2159 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2160
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002161- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2162
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002163- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2164 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2165
2166- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2167 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2168 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2169 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2170 and other systems.
2171
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002172- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2173 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2174 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2175 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 +00002176 work well with these.
2177
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002178- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2179
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002180- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002181 connections.
2182
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002183- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2184 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2185 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2186
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002187- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2188 sets
2189
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002190- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2191 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2192 name.
2193
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002194- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2195 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2196 passed in.
2197
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002198- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002199 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002200 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2201 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002202
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002203- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2204
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002205- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2206
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002207- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2208 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2209 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2210
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002211- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2212 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2213 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2214 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002215 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002216
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002217- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002218 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002219 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002220
2221- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2222 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2223 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2224
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002225- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002226 the value of its expression argument.
2227
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002228- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2229 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2230 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2231
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002232- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2233 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2234 skipstone browser was included.
2235
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002236- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2237 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2238
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002239Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002240-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002241
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002242- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2243 names in addition to accepting file names.
2244
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002245- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2246 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2247 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2248 still used and useful.)
2249
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002250- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2251 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2252 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2253 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002254
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002255- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2256 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2257 the generated binary.
2258
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002259Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002260-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002261
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002262- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2263
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002264- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2265 except in the hands of experts.
2266
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002267- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002268 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2269 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2270 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002271
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002272- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2273 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2274 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2275 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2276 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2277 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2278 builds.
2279
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002280- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2281 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2282 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2283 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2284 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2285 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2286 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2287 new type.
2288
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002289- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002290
2291 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2292 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2293 positive infinities.
2294
2295 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2296 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2297 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2298 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2299 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2300 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2301 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2302
2303 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2304
2305 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2306
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002307- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2308 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2309 size of the executable.
2310
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002311- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2312 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2313 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2314 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002315
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002316- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2317
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002318- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2319 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2320 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002321
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002322- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2323 well as Unix.
2324
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002325- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2326 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2327 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2328 modules in the README file for details.
2329
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002330C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002332
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002333- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2334 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002335 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002336 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002337 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002338
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002339- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2340 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2341 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2342 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2343 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2344 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002345 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002346 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2347 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2348 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2349 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2350 aligned.)
2351
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002352- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2353 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2354 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2355
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002356- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2357 level.
2358
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002359- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2360 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2361 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2362 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2363 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2364
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002365- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2366 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2367 code.
2368
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002369- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2370 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2371 adjusting for negative indices.
2372
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002373- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2374 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2375 object.
2376
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002377- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2378 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2379 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2380
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002381- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2382 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002383
2384- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2385
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002386- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2387 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2388 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2389 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2390
2391- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2392
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002393- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002394
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002395- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002396 without going through the buffer API.
2397
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002398- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002399
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002400- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2401 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2402 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2403 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2404
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002405- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2406 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2407
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002408- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002409 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2410
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002411New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002412-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002413
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002414- OpenVMS is now supported.
2415
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002416- AtheOS is now supported.
2417
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002418- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2419
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002420- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2421
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002422Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002423-----
2424
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002425- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2426 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2427 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002428
2429Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002430-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002431
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002432- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2433 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2434 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2435 bugs.
2436 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002437 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002438 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2439 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002440 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002441
2442- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002443 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002444
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002445- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2446 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2447
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002448- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2449 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002450 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002451 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2452
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002453- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2454 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2455 use files" uninstall option).
2456
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002457- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2458
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002459- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2460 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2461
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002462- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2463 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2464 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2465
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002466- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2467 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2468 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2469 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2470 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002471 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2472 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2473 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002474
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002475- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002476 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002477 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2478 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2479 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2480 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2481 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2482 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2483 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2484 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2485 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2486 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2487 work around.
2488
2489- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2490 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2491 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2492 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2493 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2494 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2495 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2496 specified with O_CREAT too).
2497
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002498Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002499----
2500
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002501- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002502
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002503- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2504 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2505 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2506
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002507- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2508 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2509 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2510
2511- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2512 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2513 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2514 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2515 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2516 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2517 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2518 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002519
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002520- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2521 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2522 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002523
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002524- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2525 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2526 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2527 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2528 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002529
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002530- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2531 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2532 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002533
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002534- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2535 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002536
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002537- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2538 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2539 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2540 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2541 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002542
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002543- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2544 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2545 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2546
2547- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2548 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2549 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002550
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002551- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2552 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2553 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2554 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002555 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002556
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002557- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2558 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002559
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002560- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2561 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002562
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002563- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002564 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002565 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2566 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002567
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002568
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002569What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002570===============================
2571
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002572*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2573
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002574Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002575--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002576
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002577- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2578 with a custom metaclass.
2579
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002580Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002581-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002582
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002583- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2584 are proxies.
2585
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002586Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002587-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002588
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002589- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2590 very short strings.
2591
2592- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2593 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2594 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2595 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2596 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2597
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002598Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002599-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002600
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002601- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2602 close or delete time).
2603
2604- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2605 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2606
2607- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2608
2609- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002610 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002611
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002612Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002613-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002614
2615Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002616-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002617
2618C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002619-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002620
2621New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002622-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002623
2624Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002625-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002626
2627Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002628-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002629
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002630- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2631
2632- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2633 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2634
2635- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2636 deleted at process exit time.
2637
2638- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2639 in backslash.
2640
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002641Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002642----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002643
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002644- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2645 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2646 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2647
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002648
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002649What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002650===========================
2651
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002652*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2653
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002654Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002655--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002656
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002657- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2658 been extensively updated. See
2659
2660 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2661
2662 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2663
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002664- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2665 deleted!
2666
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002667- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2668 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2669 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2670 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2671 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2672
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002673- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2674
2675 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2676 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2677
2678 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2679 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2680 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2681 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2682 supported anyway.
2683
2684 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2685 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2686
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002687- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2688 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2689 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2690 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2691 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002692
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002693- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2694 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2695 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2696
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002697Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002698-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002699
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002700- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2701 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2702 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2703 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2704 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2705 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002706 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2707 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2708 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2709 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002710
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002711- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2712 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2713 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2714
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002715Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002716-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002717
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002718- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2719
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002720Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002722
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002723- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2724 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2725 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2726 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2727 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2728 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2729
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002730- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2731
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002732- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2733
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002734- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2735
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002736- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2737 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2738 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2739
2740- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2741
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002742Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002743-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002744
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002745- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2746 off a search on Google.
2747
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002748Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002749-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002750
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002751- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2752 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2753 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2754 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2755 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2756 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2757 other platforms should do likewise.
2758
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002759- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2760 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2761 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2762
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002763C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002764-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002765
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002766- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2767 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2768 producing key-value pairs.
2769
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002770- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002771 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002772 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2773 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2774 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2775 previously went unchallenged.
2776
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002777New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002778-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002779
2780Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002782
2783Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002784-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002785
2786Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002788
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002789- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2790 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002791
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002792- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2793 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2794 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2795 home.
2796
2797
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002798What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002799===========================
2800
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002801*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2802
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002803Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002805
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002806- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2807 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002808
2809 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002810 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002811
2812 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2813 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002814 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002815 This needs to be documented.
2816
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002817- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2818 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2819
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002820- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2821 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2822 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2823
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002824- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2825 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2826
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002827- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2828 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2829 class forbids it).
2830
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002831- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2832 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2833 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2834
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002835- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2836
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002837Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002838-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002839
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002840- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2841 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002842 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002843
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002844- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2845 (like 1 + '').
2846
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002847Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002849
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002850- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2851 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2852 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2853 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002854 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002855 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2856
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002857- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2858 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2859 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2860 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2861
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002862- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2863 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002864 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2865 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2866 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002867
2868- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2869 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002870
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002871- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2872 bytes on its input.
2873
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002874Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002875-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002876
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002877- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002878 convenience function.
2879
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002880- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2881 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2882 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002883 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2884 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2885 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2886 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2887 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2888 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002889
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002890- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2891 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2892 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2893 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2894
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002895- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2896 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2897 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2898
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002899- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2900 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2901 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2902 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2903
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002904- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2905 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002906 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002907 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2908 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2909 new -l and -e options.
2910
2911- statcache is now deprecated.
2912
2913- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2914 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002915 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002916 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2917 time properly taken into account.
2918
2919- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2920 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2921 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2922 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2923
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002924Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002925-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002926
2927Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002929
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002930- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2931 is built with libdb3 if available.
2932
2933- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2934
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002935C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002937
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002938- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2939 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2940 PySequence_Size().
2941
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002942- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2943
2944- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2945 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2946 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2947
2948- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2949 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2950
2951- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2952 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002954New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002956
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002957- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2958 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2959
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002960- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2961 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2962
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002963- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2964
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002965Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002967
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002968- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2969 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2970
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002971Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002973
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002974Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002976
2977- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2978 removed completely in the next release.
2979
2980- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2981 OSX.
2982
2983- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2984 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2985
2986- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2987
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002988
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002989What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002990===========================
2991
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2993
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002994Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002996
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002997- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002998 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002999 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003000 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3001 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003002 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3003 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003004 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3005 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003006
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003007- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3008 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3009
3010- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3011 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3012
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003013Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003015
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003016- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3017 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3018 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3019 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3020 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3021 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3022 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3023 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3024
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003025- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3026 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3027 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3028 example).
3029
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003030- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003031 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003032 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003033 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003034
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003035- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3036 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3037 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003038 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003039
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003040- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3041 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3042 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3043 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3044 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3045 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3046
3047 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3048
3049 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3050
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003051Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003052-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003053
3054- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3055
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003056- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3057
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003058- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3059 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003060
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003061- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3062 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3063 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3064 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3065 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3066 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003067 attributes.
3068
3069- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3070 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3071 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003072
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003073- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3074 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3075 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003076
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003077- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3078 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3079 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003080 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3081 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3082
3083- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3084 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003085
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003086Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003088
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003089- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3090 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3091
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003092- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3093 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3094 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3095 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3096
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003097- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3098 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3099 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3100 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3101
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003102 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3103 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3104 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3105 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3106 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3107 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3108 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3109 without losing information).
3110
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003111- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003112 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3113 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3114 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3115 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3116 module).
3117
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003118 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003119 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3120 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3121 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3122 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003123
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003124- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003125 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3126 encoding.
3127
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003128- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3129 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3130
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003132 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3133
3134- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3135 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3136 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3137 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3138
3139- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3140
3141- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3142 ON, and OFF.
3143
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003144- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3145 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3146
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003147Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003148-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003149
3150- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3151 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3152 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003153
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003154- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3155 been added: -X and -E.
3156
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003157Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003159
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003160- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3161 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3162
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003163C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003165
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003166- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3167 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3168 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3169 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3170 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3171
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003172- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3173 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3174 as long) arguments.
3175
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003176- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3177 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3178 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3179 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3180 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3181 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3182
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003183- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3184 input.
3185
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003186New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003187-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003188
3189Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003191
3192Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003194
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003195- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3196 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3197 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3198
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003199- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3200 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3201 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003202 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003203
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3205 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3206 import signal
3207 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003208
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003210 while 1:
3211 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003213 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3214 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3215 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3216 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003217
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003218
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003219What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3220===========================
3221
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003222*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3223
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003224Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003226
3227- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3228 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3229 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3230
3231- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3232 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3233 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3234 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3235 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3236 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3237 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003238
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003239- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003240 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003241 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3242 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3243 associate a docstring with a property.
3244
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003245- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3246 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3247 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3248 other built-in object types.
3249
3250- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3251 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3252 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3253 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3254 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3255
3256- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3257 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3258
3259- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3260 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003261 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003262 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3263 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3264 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3265 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3266 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3267
3268- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3269 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3270 class.
3271
3272- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3273 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3274 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3275 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3276
3277- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3278 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3279 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3280 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3281
3282- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3283 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3284
3285- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3286 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3287 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3288 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3289 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003290 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003291 with the same value as s.
3292
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003293- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3294
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003295Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003297
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003298- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3299
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003300- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3301 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3302 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3303 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3304 objects.
3305
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003306- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3307 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003308 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3309 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3310
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003311- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3312 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3313 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3314
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003315Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003317
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003318- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3319 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3320 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3321 by the instances.
3322
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003323- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3324 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3325 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3326
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003327- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3328 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3329 before the entire comparison is complete.
3330
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003331- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3332 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3333 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3334
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003335- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3336 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3337 getwriter().
3338
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003339- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3340 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3341
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003342- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003343 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3344 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3345
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003346- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3347 iterable object.
3348
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003349- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3350 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003351
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003352- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3353 authentication.
3354
3355- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3356 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003357
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003358- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003359 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3360 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3361 a sample driver.)
3362
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003363Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003365
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003366- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3367 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3368 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3369 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3370 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3371 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3372 kernel has large file support.
3373
3374- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3375 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3376 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3377 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3378 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3379
3380- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3381 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3382 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3383
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003384C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003385-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003386
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003387- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3388 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3389
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003390New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003391-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003392
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003393- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3394 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3395
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003396Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003398
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003399- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3400 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3401 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3402 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3403 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3404
3405- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3406 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3407 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3408 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3409
3410- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3411 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3412
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003413Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003415
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003416- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003417 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3418 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003420
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003421What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3422===========================
3423
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003424*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3425
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003426Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003428
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003429- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3430 big to represent as a C double.
3431
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003432- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3433 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3434 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3435 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3436 restriction).
3437
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003438- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3439 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3440 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3441 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3442 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3443
3444 >>> dir([])
3445 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3446 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3447 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3448 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3449 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3450 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3451 'reverse', 'sort']
3452
3453 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3454
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003455- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003456 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3457 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3458 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3459 OverflowError exception.
3460
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003461- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003462 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003463 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3464 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3465 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3466 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3467 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003468 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3470 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3471
3472 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3473 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3474 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3475 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003476
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003477- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003478 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3479 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3480 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3481 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3482 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3483 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3484 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3485 once it is created.
3486
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003487- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3488 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3489 (key, value) pairs.
3490
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003491- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003492 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3493 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3494
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003495- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3496 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3497 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3498 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3499 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003500
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003501- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003502 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3503 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3504
3505 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3506
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003507- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003508 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3509
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003510Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003512
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003513- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003514 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3515 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003516
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003517- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3518 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3519 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3520 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3521 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3522 in this area anymore).
3523
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003524- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3525 threading.Timer.
3526
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003527- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3528 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3529
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003530- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003531 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3532
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003533- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003534 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3535 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3536 converted to Python longs.
3537
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003538- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003539 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3540
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003541- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3542 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3543 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3544
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003545Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003547
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003548- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3549 division operators as per PEP 238.
3550
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003551Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003553
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003554- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3555 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3556 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3557 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3558
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003559C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003561
3562- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003563
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003564- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3565 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003566 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003567
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3569 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003570 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003572
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003573- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003574 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3575 module:
3576
3577 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003578
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003579 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3580 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003581
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003582 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3583 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003584
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003585 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3586
3587 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3588
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003589- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003590 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3591 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3592 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003593
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003594New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003596
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003597- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3598 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3599 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3600 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3601 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003602
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003603Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003605
3606Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003608
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003609- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3610 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3611 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3612 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003613 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3614 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3615 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3616 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3617 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003618
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003619- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003620 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3621
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003622
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003623What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3624===========================
3625
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3627
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003628Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003630
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003631- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3632 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3633
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003634- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3635 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3636 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003637
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003638- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3639 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3640 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3641 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003642
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003643- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3644
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003646
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003647Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003649
3650- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003651 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003652 the module docstring for details.
3653
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003654Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003656
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003657- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003658 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3659 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3660 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003661
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003662- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3663 Nick Mathewson.
3664
3665Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003666----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003667
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003668- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3669 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3670 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3671 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3672 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3673 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3674 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3675 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3676
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003677- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3678 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3679 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3680 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3681
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003682- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3683 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3684 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3685 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3686 come a long way).
3687
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003688- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3689 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3690 write filters for these warnings).
3691
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003692- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3693 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3694 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3695 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3696 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3697
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003698- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3699 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3700 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3701 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3702 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3703 older distribution.
3704
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003705Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003707
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003708- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3709 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003710 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003711
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003712- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3713 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3714 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3715
3716- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3717
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003718- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3719
3720- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3721
3722- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3723
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003724- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003725
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003726- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3727
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003728New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003730
3731C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003733
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003734- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3735 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3736 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3737 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3738 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3739 against buffer overruns.
3740
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003741- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003742 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3743 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003744 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3745 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3746 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3747
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003748- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3749 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3750 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3751 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3752 deprecated.
3753
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003754Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003756
3757- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3758 relevant is found.
3759
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003760
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003761What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003762===========================
3763
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003764*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3765
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003766Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003767----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003768
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003769- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3770 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3771 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3772 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3773 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3774 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3775 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3776 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003777 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003778 repaired.
3779
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003780- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003781 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003782 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3783 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3784 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3785 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3786 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3787 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3788 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3789 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3790
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003791- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3792 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3793 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3794 leading BMO character).
3795
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003796- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3797 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3798 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3799
3800 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3801 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3802 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003803
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003804 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3805 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3806 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3807 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3808 for various simple to use conversions.
3809
3810 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3811 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3814 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3815 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3816 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3817 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3818 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3819 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3820 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3821 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3822 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3823 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3824 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3825 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3826 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3827 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003828
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003829- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3830 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3831 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003832 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003833 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003834
3835 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003836 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3837 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3838 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3839 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3840 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003841 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3842 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003843
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003844 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3845 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3846 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003847 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003848
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003849- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3850 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3851 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3852 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3853 floating arithmetic,
3854
3855 x = 9007199254740992.0
3856 print long(x)
3857
3858 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3859 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3860 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3861 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3862 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3863 functions are of good quality).
3864
3865 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3866 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3867 algorithms to break.
3868
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003869- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3870 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3871 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3872 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3873 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3874 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3875 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3876 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3877 order.
3878
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003879- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3880 operation along the most common code paths.
3881
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003882- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3883 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3884
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003885- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3886 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3887 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3888 {}.update(UserDict())
3889
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003890- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3891 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3892 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3893 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3894 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3895 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3896 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3897 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3898
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003899- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003900 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003901
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003902 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003903 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3904 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003905 join() method of strings
3906 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003907 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3908 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003910 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003911
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003912- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3913 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3914
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003915- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3916 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3917
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003918- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3919 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3920 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3921 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3922
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003923- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3924 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003925 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003926 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3927 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003928
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003929- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3930
3931
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003932Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003934
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003935- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003936 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003937 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3938 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3939
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003940- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3941 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3942
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003943- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3944 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3945 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3946 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3947
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003948- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3949 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3950 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3951
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003952- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3953
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003954- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3955
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003956- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3957 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3958 that are still imported into string.py).
3959
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003960- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3961
3962- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3963 Now it does.
3964
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003965- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3966
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003967- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3968 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3969 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3970 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3971 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003972 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3973 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003974
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003975- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3976 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3977 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3978 'help(object)'.
3979
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003980Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003982
3983- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003984 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003985 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3986 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3987
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003988- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003989 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3990 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003991
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003992C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003994
3995- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3996 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997
3998----
3999
4000**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**