blob: 5405ce54b1d5b43412e26c0a19beb58754d83201 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000015
16- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
17 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
18 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
19 #693195.)
20
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000021- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
22 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000023
24Extension modules
25-----------------
26
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000027- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
28 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
29 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000030
31Library
32-------
33
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +000034- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on platforms that set
35 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding, for file names that are not representable
36 in ASCII. (This currently only affects MacOS X; on Windows versions
37 with wide file name support os.listdir() already returned Unicode
38 strings.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000039
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +000040- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
41 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
42 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
43
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000044Tools/Demos
45-----------
46
47TBD
48
49Build
50-----
51
Neal Norwitz2c92c6e2003-02-28 17:24:00 +000052- Fix build problems when _iconv_codec failed. (SF bug #690012.)
53
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +000054- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
55 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000056
57C API
58-----
59
60TBD
61
62New platforms
63-------------
64
65TBD
66
67Tests
68-----
69
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +000070- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
71 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000072
73Windows
74-------
75
76TBD
77
78Mac
79---
80
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +000081- os.listdir() now may return Unicode strings on MacOS X. See the general
82 news item under "Library".
83
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +000084- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
85 the window manager, false otherwise.
Jack Jansen4213e272003-02-27 22:52:58 +000086
87- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000088
89
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000090What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
91=================================
92
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +000093*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000094
95Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +000096-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000097
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +000098- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
99 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
100 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
101
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000102- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
103 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
104 (SF patch #664376.)
105
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000106- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
107 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
108 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
109 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
110 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
111 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000112 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000113
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000114- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
115 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
116 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
117 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000118 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000119
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000120- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
121 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
122 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
123 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
124 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
125 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
126 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
127 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
128 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
129 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
130 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
131
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000132- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
133 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
134 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
135 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
136 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
137 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
138
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000139- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
140 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
141
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000142- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
143 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
144 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
145 case.)
146
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000147- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
148 passed as unicode strings.
149
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000150- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
151 See SF bug #683467.
152
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000153- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
154 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
155
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000156- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
157
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000158- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
159
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000160- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
161 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
162 arguments.
163
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000164- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
165 See SF bug #667147.
166
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000167- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000168 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000169 See SF bug #676155.
170
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000171- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000172 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000173 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
174 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
175 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
176 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
177 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
178 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000179
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000180Extension modules
181-----------------
182
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000183- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
184 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
185 tp_as_number pointer.
186
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000187- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
188 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
189 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
190 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
191 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
192
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000193- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
194
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000195- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
196
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000197- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000198 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000199 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
200 patch #678531.)
201
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000202- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
203 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
204
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000205- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
206 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
207
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000208- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
209 library.
210
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000211- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
212
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000213- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
214 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
215 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
216
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000217- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
218
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000219- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
220 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
221
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000222- Fixed serveral serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
223
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000224- datetime changes:
225
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000226 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
227 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
228 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
229 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
230 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
231 now.
232
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000233 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000234 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
235 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000236
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000237 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000238 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000239 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
240 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
241 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
242 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000243
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000244 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
245 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
246 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000247 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
248
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000249 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
250 by a later example coded by Guido.
251
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000252 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000253 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
254 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
255 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000256 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
257 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
258
259 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
260 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
261 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
262 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
263 tzinfo subclass instance.
264
265 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
266 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
267 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
268 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
269 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
270 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
271 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
272 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000273
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000274 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
275 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
276 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
277 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
278 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000279 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
280
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000281 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000282
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000283 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
284 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
285 as a naive datetime object.
286
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000287 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
288 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
289 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
290
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000291 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
292 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
293 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
294 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
295 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
296 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
297 comparison.
298
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000299 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
300 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
301 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
302 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000303 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000304
305 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000306
307 and ::
308
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000309 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
310
311 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
312 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
313 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
314 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
315
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000316 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
317 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
318 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
319 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
320 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
321
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000322 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
323 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000324 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
325 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000326
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000327Library
328-------
329
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000330- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
331 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
332
333- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
334 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
335 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
336 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
337 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
338 See PEP 307 for details.
339
340- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
341 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
342
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000343- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
344 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000345 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
346 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
347 available from the os module.
348 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000349
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000350- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
351 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
352
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000353- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
354 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
355 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
356
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000357- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
358
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000359- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
360 exception.
361
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000362- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
363 class.
364
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000365- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
366 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
367 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
368
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000369- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
370 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
371
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000372- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000373 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
374 See SF bug #659228.
375
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000376- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
377 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
378 See SF patch #651082.
379
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000380- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000381
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000382- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
383 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
384
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000385- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000386 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000387
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000388- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
389 DOS paths from other platforms.
390
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000391Tools/Demos
392-----------
393
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000394- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
395 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
396 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
397 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
398 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
399 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
400 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
401 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
402 example:
403
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000404 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
405 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000406
407 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
408
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000409
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000410Build
411-----
412
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000413- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
414 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
415 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000416 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
417
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000418 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
419
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000420- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
421 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
422 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
423 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
424 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
425 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
426 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
427 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
428 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
429
430- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
431 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
432 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
433 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
434
435- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
436 from the Tools/scripts directory.
437
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000438C API
439-----
440
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000441- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
442 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000443
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000444- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
445 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
446 tp_as_number pointer.
447
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000448- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
449 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
450 (SF #681367)
451
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000452- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
453 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
454 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
455 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000456
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000457Tests
458-----
459
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000460- Several tests weren't being run rom regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
461 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
462 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
463 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
464 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
465 pydoc.)
466
467- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
468
469- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000470
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000471Windows
472-------
473
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000474- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
475 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
476 time).
477
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000478- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
479 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
480
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000481- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
482 release without strong cryptography.
483
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000484- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000485 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000486
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000487- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
488 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
489
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000490Mac
491---
492
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000493- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
494 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000495
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000496- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
497 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
498 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000499
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000500- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
501 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000502
503- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
504 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
505 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
506 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
507
508- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000509 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
510 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
511 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000512
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000513
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000514What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000515=================================
516
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000517*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000518
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000519Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000520--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000521
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000522- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
523
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000524- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
525 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000526 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000527 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000528 a different meaning than before.
529
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000530- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000531 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000532 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000533
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000534- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000535 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000536 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000537
538- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
539 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
540 and deallocation.
541
542- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
543 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
544
545- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
546 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
547 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
548 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
549 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
550
551- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
552 now detected by the garbage collector.
553
554- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
555 [SF bug 519621]
556
557- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
558 identifier.
559
560- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
561 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
562 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
563 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
564 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
565 [SF bug 563060]
566
567- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
568 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
569 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
570 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
571 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
572
573- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
574 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
575 not called. [SF bug #537450]
576
577- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
578
579- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
580 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
581 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
582 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
583 state of the slots would be lost.)
584
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000585Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000586-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000587
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000588- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000589 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
590 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
591 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
592 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000593 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
594 Jython 2.1.
595
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000596- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000597 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000598 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
599 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
600 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
601 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
602 these, see PEP 302.
603
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000604- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
605 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
606 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
607
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000608- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
609 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
610 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
611
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000612- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
613 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
614 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
615
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000616- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
617 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
618 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
619 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
620 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
621 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
622 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
623 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
624 releases or implementations.
625
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000626- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000627 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
628 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000629
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000630- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
631 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
632
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000633- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
634 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
635 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
636
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000637- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
638 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
639
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000640- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
641 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000642 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
643 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000644
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000645- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
646 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
647 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
648 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
649 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
650
651 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
652 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
653 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
654 pattern.
655
656 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
657 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
658 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
659 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
660
661 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
662 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
663 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
664 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
665 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
666 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
667
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000668- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
669 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
670 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
671 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
672 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
673 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
674 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
675 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000676
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000677- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
678 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
679 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
680 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
681 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000682 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
683 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
684 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
685 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
686 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
687 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
688 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000689
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000690- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
691 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
692
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000693- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
694 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
695 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
696 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
697 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
698 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
699 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
700 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
701 to Zack Weinberg!
702
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000703- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
704 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
705 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
706 type. This has been fixed now.
707
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000708- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
709 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
710 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
711
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000712- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
713 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
714 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
715 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
716 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
717 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
718 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
719 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000720 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000721
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000722- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
723 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
724 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000725
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000726- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
727 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
728 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
729 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
730 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
731 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
732 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
733 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000734 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000735 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
736 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
737
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000738- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
739 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
740 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
741 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
742 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
743 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
744 this.)
745
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000746- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
747 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000748 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000749 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000750 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
751 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000752 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
753 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000754
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000755- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
756 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
757 currently running.
758
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000759- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
760 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
761 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
762 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
763
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000764- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
765 as directory names.
766
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000767- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
768 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
769
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000770- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
771 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
772
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000773- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000774 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
775 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000776
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000777- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
778 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
779 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
780 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
781 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
782
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000783- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
784 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
785 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
786 removed.
787
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000788- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
789 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
790 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
791
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000792- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
793 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
794 to __debug__.
795
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000796- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
797 string to the left with zeros. For example,
798 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
799
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000800- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
801 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
802 deprecated now.
803
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000804- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
805 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
806 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000807
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000808- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
809 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
810 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
811 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
812 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000813
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000814- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
815 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
816
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000817- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
818 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
819 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000820 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000821 is backward compatible.
822
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000823- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
824 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
825 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
826 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
827 could access a pointer to freed memory.
828
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000829- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
830 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
831 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
832 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
833 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
834 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000835
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000836- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
837 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
838
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000839- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
840 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
841
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000842- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
843 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
844 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
845 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
846 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
847
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000848- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
849 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
850 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
851
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000852- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000853 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
854
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000855- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
856 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
857 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000858
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000859- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
860 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
861
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000862- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
863 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
864 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
865
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000866- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
867
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000868Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000869-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000870
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000871- Added three operators to the operator module:
872 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
873 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
874 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
875
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000876- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
877
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000878- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
879 archives.
880
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000881- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
882 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
883 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
884
885 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
886
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000887- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
888 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
889 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000890 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000891
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000892- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
893 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
894 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
895 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000896 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
897 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
898 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
899 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000900
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000901- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
902 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000903
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000904- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
905
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000906- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
907 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
908
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000909- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
910 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
911 supported.
912
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000913- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
914
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000915- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
916 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000917
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000918- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
919 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
920
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000921- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
922
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000923- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
924 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
925
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000926- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
927 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
928 functions but callable type objects.
929
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000930- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000931 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000932 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000933
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000934- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
935 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000936
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000937- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
938 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000939
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000940- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
941 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
942 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
943 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
944
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000945- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
946 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000947
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000948- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
949 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
950 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
951 and __imul__.
952
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000953- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000954 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
955 is called.
956
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000957- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
958 been added where available.
959
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000960- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
961 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
962 interpreter was compiled.
963
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000964- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
965 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
966 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000967 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000968 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
969 1, not 2.
970
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000971- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
972 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
973 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
974 limit.
975
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000976- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
977 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
978 bug #623464.
979
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000980- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
981 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
982 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
983 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
984
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000985Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000986-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000987
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000988- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
989
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000990- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
991 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
992 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
993 with Python 2.3a2.
994
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000995- os.path exposes getctime.
996
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000997- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
998 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
999 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
1000 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
1001 unit tests of floating point results.
1002
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001003- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1004 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1005 has been increased.
1006
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001007- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1008 executed.
1009
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001010- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1011 postinstallation script.
1012
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001013- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1014 test the current module.
1015
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001016- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
1017 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1018 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1019 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1020 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1021
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001022- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001023 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001024 Ward's Optik package.
1025
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001026- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1027 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1028 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1029 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1030
1031- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1032 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001033 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001034
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001035- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1036 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1037 shelf are binary pickles.
1038
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001039- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1040 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1041
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001042- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1043 modules are iterators now.
1044
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001045- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1046 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1047 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1048 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1049 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1050 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001051
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001052- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1053 with their entity value.
1054
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001055- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1056
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001057- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1058 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001059
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001060- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1061 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001062 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001063
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001064- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1065 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1066 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1067 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1068 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1069 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1070 main():
1071
1072 import locale
1073 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1074
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001075- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1076 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1077
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001078- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1079 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1080 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1081 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1082 to the new standard.
1083
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001084- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1085 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1086 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1087 an extension to the database.
1088
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001089- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1090 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1091 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1092 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001093 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001094
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001095- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001096 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001097
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001098- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1099 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1100 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1101 bounded integers.
1102
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001103- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1104 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1105 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1106 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1107 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1108 in existence.
1109
1110 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1111 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1112 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1113 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1114 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1115 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1116
1117 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1118 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1119 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1120 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1121
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001122- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1123 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1124 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1125
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001126- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1127
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001128- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1129 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1130 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1131 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1132
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001133- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1134 argument.
1135
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001136- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1137 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1138 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1139 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1140 [SF patch 560794].
1141
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001142- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1143 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1144 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001145 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1146 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1147 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001148
1149- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1150 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001151
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001152- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1153 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1154 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1155 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001156
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001157- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1158 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1159 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1160 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1161 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1162
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001163- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001164
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001165- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1166
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001167- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1168 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1169 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1170 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1171 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1172 identical to None.
1173
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001174- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1175 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1176 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1177 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1178 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1179 results now.
1180
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001181- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1182 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1183
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001184- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1185 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1186 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1187 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1188 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1189 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1190 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1191 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1192
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001193- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1194
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001195- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1196 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1197
1198- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1199 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1200 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1201 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1202 and other systems.
1203
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001204- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1205 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1206 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1207 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 +00001208 work well with these.
1209
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001210- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1211
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001212- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001213 connections.
1214
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001215- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1216 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1217 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1218
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001219- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1220 sets
1221
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001222- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1223 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1224 name.
1225
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001226- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1227 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1228 passed in.
1229
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001230- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001231 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001232 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1233 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001234
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001235- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1236
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001237- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1238
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001239- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1240 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1241 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1242
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001243- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1244 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1245 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1246 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001247 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001248
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001249- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001250 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001251 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001252
1253- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1254 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1255 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1256
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001257- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001258 the value of its expression argument.
1259
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001260- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1261 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1262 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1263
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001264- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1265 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1266 skipstone browser was included.
1267
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001268- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1269 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1270
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001271Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001272-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001273
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001274- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1275 names in addition to accepting file names.
1276
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001277- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1278 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1279 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1280 still used and useful.)
1281
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001282- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1283 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1284 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1285 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001286
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001287- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1288 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1289 the generated binary.
1290
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001291Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001292-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001293
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001294- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1295
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001296- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1297 except in the hands of experts.
1298
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001299- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001300 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1301 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1302 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001303
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001304- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1305 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1306 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1307 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1308 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1309 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1310 builds.
1311
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001312- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1313 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1314 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1315 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1316 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1317 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1318 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1319 new type.
1320
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001321- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001322
1323 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1324 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1325 positive infinities.
1326
1327 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1328 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1329 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1330 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1331 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1332 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1333 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1334
1335 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1336
1337 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1338
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001339- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1340 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1341 size of the executable.
1342
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001343- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1344 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1345 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1346 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001347
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001348- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1349
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001350- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1351 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1352 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001353
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001354- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1355 well as Unix.
1356
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001357- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1358 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1359 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1360 modules in the README file for details.
1361
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001362C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001363-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001364
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001365- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1366 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001367 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001368 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001369 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001370
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001371- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1372 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1373 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1374 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1375 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1376 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1377 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1378 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1379 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1380 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1381 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1382 aligned.)
1383
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001384- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1385 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1386 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1387
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001388- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1389 level.
1390
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001391- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1392 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1393 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1394 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1395 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1396
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001397- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1398 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1399 code.
1400
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001401- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1402 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1403 adjusting for negative indices.
1404
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001405- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1406 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1407 object.
1408
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001409- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1410 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1411 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1412
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001413- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1414 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001415
1416- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1417
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001418- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1419 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1420 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1421 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1422
1423- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1424
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001425- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001426
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001427- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001428 without going through the buffer API.
1429
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001430- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001431
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001432- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1433 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1434 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1435 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1436
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001437- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1438 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1439
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001440- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001441 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1442
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001443New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001444-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001445
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001446- OpenVMS is now supported.
1447
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001448- AtheOS is now supported.
1449
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001450- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1451
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001452- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1453
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001454Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001455-----
1456
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001457- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1458 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1459 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001460
1461Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001462-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001463
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001464- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1465 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1466 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1467 bugs.
1468 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001469 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1470 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1471 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001472 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001473
1474- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001475 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001476
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001477- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1478 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1479
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001480- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1481 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1482 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1483 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1484
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001485- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1486 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1487 use files" uninstall option).
1488
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001489- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1490
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001491- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1492 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1493
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001494- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1495 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1496 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1497
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001498- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1499 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1500 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1501 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1502 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001503 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1504 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1505 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001506
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001507- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001508 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001509 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1510 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1511 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1512 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1513 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1514 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1515 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1516 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1517 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1518 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1519 work around.
1520
1521- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1522 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1523 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1524 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1525 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1526 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1527 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1528 specified with O_CREAT too).
1529
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001530Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001531----
1532
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001533- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001534
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001535- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1536 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1537 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1538
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001539- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1540 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1541 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1542
1543- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1544 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1545 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1546 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1547 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1548 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1549 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1550 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001551
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001552- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1553 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1554 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001555
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001556- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1557 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1558 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1559 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1560 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001561
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001562- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1563 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1564 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001565
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001566- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1567 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001568
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001569- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1570 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1571 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1572 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1573 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001574
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001575- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1576 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1577 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1578
1579- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1580 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1581 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001582
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001583- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1584 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1585 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1586 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1587 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001588
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001589- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1590 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001591
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001592- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1593 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001594
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001595- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001596 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001597 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1598 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001599
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001600
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001601What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001602===============================
1603
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001604*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1605
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001606Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001607--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001608
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001609- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1610 with a custom metaclass.
1611
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001612Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001613-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001614
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001615- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1616 are proxies.
1617
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001618Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001619-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001620
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001621- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1622 very short strings.
1623
1624- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1625 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1626 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1627 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1628 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1629
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001630Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001631-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001632
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001633- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1634 close or delete time).
1635
1636- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1637 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1638
1639- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1640
1641- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001642 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001643
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001644Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001645-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001646
1647Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001648-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001649
1650C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001651-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001652
1653New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001654-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001655
1656Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001657-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001658
1659Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001660-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001661
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001662- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1663
1664- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1665 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1666
1667- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1668 deleted at process exit time.
1669
1670- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1671 in backslash.
1672
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001673Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001674----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001675
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001676- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1677 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1678 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1679
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001680
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001681What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001682===========================
1683
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001684*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1685
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001686Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001687--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001688
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001689- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1690 been extensively updated. See
1691
1692 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1693
1694 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1695
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001696- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1697 deleted!
1698
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001699- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1700 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1701 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1702 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1703 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1704
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001705- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1706
1707 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1708 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1709
1710 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1711 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1712 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1713 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1714 supported anyway.
1715
1716 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1717 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1718
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001719- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1720 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1721 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1722 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1723 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001724
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001725- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1726 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1727 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1728
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001729Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001730-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001731
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001732- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1733 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1734 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1735 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1736 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1737 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001738 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1739 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1740 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1741 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001742
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001743- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1744 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1745 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1746
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001747Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001748-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001749
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001750- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1751
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001752Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001753-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001754
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001755- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1756 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1757 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1758 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1759 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1760 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1761
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001762- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1763
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001764- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1765
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001766- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1767
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001768- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1769 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1770 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1771
1772- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1773
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001774Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001775-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001776
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001777- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1778 off a search on Google.
1779
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001780Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001781-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001782
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001783- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1784 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1785 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1786 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1787 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1788 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1789 other platforms should do likewise.
1790
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001791- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1792 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1793 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1794
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001795C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001796-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001797
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001798- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1799 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1800 producing key-value pairs.
1801
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001802- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001803 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001804 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1805 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1806 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1807 previously went unchallenged.
1808
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001809New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001810-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001811
1812Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001813-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001814
1815Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001816-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001817
1818Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001819----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001820
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001821- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1822 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001823
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001824- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1825 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1826 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1827 home.
1828
1829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001830What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001831===========================
1832
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001833*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1834
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001835Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001836--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001837
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001838- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1839 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001840
1841 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001842 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001843
1844 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1845 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001846 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001847 This needs to be documented.
1848
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001849- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1850 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1851
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001852- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1853 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1854 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1855
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001856- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1857 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1858
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001859- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1860 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1861 class forbids it).
1862
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001863- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1864 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1865 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1866
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001867- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001869Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001870-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001871
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001872- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1873 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001874 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001875
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001876- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1877 (like 1 + '').
1878
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001879Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001880-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001881
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001882- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1883 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1884 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1885 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001886 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001887 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1888
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001889- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1890 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1891 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1892 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1893
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001894- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1895 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001896 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1897 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1898 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001899
1900- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1901 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001902
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001903- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1904 bytes on its input.
1905
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001906Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001907-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001908
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001909- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001910 convenience function.
1911
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001912- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1913 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1914 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001915 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1916 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1917 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1918 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1919 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1920 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001921
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001922- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1923 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1924 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1925 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1926
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001927- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1928 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1929 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1930
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001931- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1932 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1933 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1934 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1935
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001936- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1937 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001938 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001939 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1940 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1941 new -l and -e options.
1942
1943- statcache is now deprecated.
1944
1945- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1946 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001947 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001948 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1949 time properly taken into account.
1950
1951- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1952 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1953 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1954 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1955
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001956Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001957-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001958
1959Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001960-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001961
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001962- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1963 is built with libdb3 if available.
1964
1965- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1966
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001967C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001968-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001969
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001970- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1971 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1972 PySequence_Size().
1973
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001974- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1975
1976- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1977 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1978 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1979
1980- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1981 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1982
1983- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1984 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1985
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001986New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001987-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001988
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001989- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1990 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1991
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001992- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1993 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1994
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001995- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1996
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001998-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001999
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002000- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2001 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2002
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002003Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002004-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002005
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002006Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002007----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002008
2009- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2010 removed completely in the next release.
2011
2012- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2013 OSX.
2014
2015- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2016 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2017
2018- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2019
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002020
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002021What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002022===========================
2023
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002024*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2025
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002026Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002027--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002028
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002029- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002030 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002031 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002032 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2033 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002034 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2035 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002036 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2037 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002038
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002039- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2040 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2041
2042- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2043 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2044
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002045Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002047
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002048- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2049 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2050 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2051 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2052 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2053 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2054 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2055 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2056
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002057- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2058 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2059 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2060 example).
2061
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002062- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002063 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002064 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002065 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002066
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002067- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2068 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2069 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002070 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002071
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002072- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2073 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2074 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2075 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2076 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2077 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2078
2079 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2080
2081 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2082
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002083Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002084-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002085
2086- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2087
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002088- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2089
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002090- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2091 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002092
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002093- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2094 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2095 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2096 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2097 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2098 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002099 attributes.
2100
2101- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2102 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2103 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002104
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002105- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2106 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2107 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002108
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002109- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2110 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2111 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002112 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2113 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2114
2115- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2116 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002117
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002118Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002119-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002120
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002121- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2122 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2123
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002124- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2125 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2126 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2127 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2128
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002129- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2130 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2131 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2132 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2133
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002134 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2135 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2136 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2137 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2138 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2139 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2140 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2141 without losing information).
2142
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002143- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002144 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2145 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2146 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2147 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2148 module).
2149
2150 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
2151 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2152 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2153 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2154 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002155
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002156- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002157 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2158 encoding.
2159
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002160- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2161 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002163- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002164 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2165
2166- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2167 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2168 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2169 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2170
2171- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2172
2173- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2174 ON, and OFF.
2175
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002176- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2177 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2178
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002179Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002180-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002181
2182- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2183 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2184 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002185
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002186- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2187 been added: -X and -E.
2188
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002189Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002190-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002191
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002192- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2193 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2194
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002195C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002197
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002198- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2199 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2200 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2201 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2202 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2203
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002204- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2205 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2206 as long) arguments.
2207
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002208- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2209 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2210 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2211 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2212 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2213 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2214
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002215- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2216 input.
2217
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002218New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002219-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002220
2221Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002222-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002223
2224Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002225-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002226
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002227- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2228 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2229 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2230
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002231- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2232 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2233 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002234 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002235
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002236 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2237 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2238 import signal
2239 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002240
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002241 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002242 while 1:
2243 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002245 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2246 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2247 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2248 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002249
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002250
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002251What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2252===========================
2253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002254*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2255
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002256Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002257--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002258
2259- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2260 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2261 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2262
2263- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2264 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2265 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2266 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2267 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2268 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2269 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002270
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002271- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002272 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002273 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2274 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2275 associate a docstring with a property.
2276
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002277- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2278 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2279 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2280 other built-in object types.
2281
2282- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2283 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2284 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2285 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2286 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2287
2288- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2289 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2290
2291- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2292 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002293 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002294 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2295 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2296 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2297 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2298 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2299
2300- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2301 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2302 class.
2303
2304- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2305 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2306 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2307 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2308
2309- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2310 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2311 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2312 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2313
2314- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2315 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2316
2317- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2318 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2319 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2320 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2321 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002322 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002323 with the same value as s.
2324
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002325- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2326
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002327Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002328----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002329
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002330- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2331
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002332- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2333 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2334 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2335 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2336 objects.
2337
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002338- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2339 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002340 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2341 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2342
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002343- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2344 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2345 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2346
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002347Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002348-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002349
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002350- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2351 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2352 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2353 by the instances.
2354
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002355- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2356 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2357 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2358
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002359- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2360 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2361 before the entire comparison is complete.
2362
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002363- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2364 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2365 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2366
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002367- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2368 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2369 getwriter().
2370
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002371- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2372 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2373
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002374- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002375 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2376 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2377
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002378- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2379 iterable object.
2380
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002381- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2382 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002383
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002384- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2385 authentication.
2386
2387- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2388 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002389
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002390- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002391 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2392 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2393 a sample driver.)
2394
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002395Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002397
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002398- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2399 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2400 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2401 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2402 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2403 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2404 kernel has large file support.
2405
2406- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2407 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2408 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2409 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2410 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2411
2412- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2413 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2414 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2415
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002416C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002417-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002418
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002419- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2420 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2421
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002422New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002423-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002424
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002425- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2426 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2427
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002428Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002429-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002430
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002431- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2432 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2433 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2434 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2435 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2436
2437- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2438 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2439 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2440 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2441
2442- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2443 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2444
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002445Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002446-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002447
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002448- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002449 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2450 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002451
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002452
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002453What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2454===========================
2455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002456*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2457
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002458Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002459----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002460
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002461- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2462 big to represent as a C double.
2463
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002464- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2465 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2466 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2467 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2468 restriction).
2469
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002470- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2471 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2472 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2473 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2474 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2475
2476 >>> dir([])
2477 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2478 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2479 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2480 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2481 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2482 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2483 'reverse', 'sort']
2484
2485 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2486
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002487- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002488 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2489 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2490 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2491 OverflowError exception.
2492
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002493- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002494 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002495 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2496 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2497 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2498 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2499 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002500 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002501 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2502 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2503
2504 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2505 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2506 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2507 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002508
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002509- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002510 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2511 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2512 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2513 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2514 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2515 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2516 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2517 once it is created.
2518
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002519- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2520 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2521 (key, value) pairs.
2522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002523- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002524 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2525 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2526
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002527- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2528 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2529 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2530 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2531 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002532
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002533- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002534 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2535 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2536
2537 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2538
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002539- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002540 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2541
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002542Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002543-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002544
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002545- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002546 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2547 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002548
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002549- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2550 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2551 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2552 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2553 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2554 in this area anymore).
2555
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002556- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2557 threading.Timer.
2558
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002559- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2560 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2561
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002562- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002563 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2564
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002565- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002566 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2567 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2568 converted to Python longs.
2569
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002570- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002571 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2572
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002573- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2574 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2575 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2576
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002577Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002578-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002579
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002580- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2581 division operators as per PEP 238.
2582
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002583Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002584-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002585
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002586- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2587 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2588 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2589 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2590
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002591C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002592-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002593
2594- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002595
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002596- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2597 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002598 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002599
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002600 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2601 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002602 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002603 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002605- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002606 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2607 module:
2608
2609 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002610
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002611 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2612 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002613
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002614 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2615 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002616
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002617 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2618
2619 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2620
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002621- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002622 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2623 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2624 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002625
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002626New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002627-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002628
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002629- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2630 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2631 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2632 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2633 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002634
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002635Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002636-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002637
2638Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002639-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002640
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002641- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2642 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2643 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2644 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002645 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2646 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2647 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2648 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2649 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002650
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002651- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002652 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2653
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002654
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002655What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2656===========================
2657
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002658*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2659
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002660Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002662
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002663- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2664 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2665
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002666- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2667 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2668 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002669
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002670- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2671 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2672 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2673 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002674
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002675- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2676
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002677- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002678
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002679Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002681
2682- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002683 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002684 the module docstring for details.
2685
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002686Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002688
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002689- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002690 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2691 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2692 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002693
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002694- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2695 Nick Mathewson.
2696
2697Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002698----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002699
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002700- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2701 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2702 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2703 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2704 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2705 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2706 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2707 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2708
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002709- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2710 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2711 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2712 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2713
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002714- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2715 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2716 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2717 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2718 come a long way).
2719
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002720- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2721 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2722 write filters for these warnings).
2723
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002724- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2725 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2726 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2727 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2728 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2729
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002730- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2731 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2732 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2733 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2734 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2735 older distribution.
2736
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002737Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002738-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002739
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002740- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2741 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002742 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002743
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002744- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2745 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2746 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2747
2748- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2749
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002750- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2751
2752- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2753
2754- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2755
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002756- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002757
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002758- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2759
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002760New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002761-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002762
2763C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002764-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002765
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002766- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2767 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2768 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2769 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2770 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2771 against buffer overruns.
2772
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002773- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002774 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2775 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002776 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2777 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2778 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2779
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002780- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2781 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2782 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2783 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2784 deprecated.
2785
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002786Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002788
2789- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2790 relevant is found.
2791
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002792
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002793What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002794===========================
2795
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002796*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2797
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002798Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002800
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002801- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2802 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2803 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2804 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2805 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2806 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2807 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2808 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002809 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002810 repaired.
2811
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002812- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002813 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002814 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2815 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2816 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2817 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2818 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2819 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2820 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2821 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2822
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002823- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2824 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2825 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2826 leading BMO character).
2827
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002828- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2829 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2830 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2831
2832 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2833 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2834 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002835
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002836 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2837 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2838 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2839 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2840 for various simple to use conversions.
2841
2842 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2843 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2846 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2847 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2848 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2849 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2850 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2851 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2852 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2853 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2854 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2855 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2856 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2857 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2858 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2859 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002860
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002861- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2862 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2863 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002864 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002865 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002866
2867 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002868 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2869 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2870 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2871 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2872 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002873 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2874 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002875
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002876 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2877 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2878 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002879 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002880
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002881- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2882 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2883 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2884 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2885 floating arithmetic,
2886
2887 x = 9007199254740992.0
2888 print long(x)
2889
2890 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2891 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2892 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2893 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2894 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2895 functions are of good quality).
2896
2897 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2898 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2899 algorithms to break.
2900
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002901- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2902 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2903 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2904 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2905 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2906 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2907 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2908 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2909 order.
2910
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002911- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2912 operation along the most common code paths.
2913
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002914- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2915 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2916
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002917- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2918 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2919 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2920 {}.update(UserDict())
2921
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002922- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2923 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2924 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2925 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2926 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2927 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2928 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2929 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2930
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002931- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002932 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002934 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002935 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2936 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002937 join() method of strings
2938 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002939 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2940 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002941 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002942 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002943
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002944- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2945 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2946
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002947- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2948 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2949
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002950- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2951 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2952 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2953 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2954
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002955- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2956 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002957 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002958 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2959 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002960
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002961- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2962
2963
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002964Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002965-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002966
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002967- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002968 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002969 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2970 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2971
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002972- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2973 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2974
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002975- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2976 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2977 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2978 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2979
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002980- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2981 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2982 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2983
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002984- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2985
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002986- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2987
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002988- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2989 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2990 that are still imported into string.py).
2991
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002992- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2993
2994- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2995 Now it does.
2996
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002997- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2998
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002999- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3000 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3001 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3002 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3003 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003004 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3005 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003006
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003007- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3008 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3009 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3010 'help(object)'.
3011
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003012Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003014
3015- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003016 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003017 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3018 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3019
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003020- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003021 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3022 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003023
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003024C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003026
3027- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3028 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029
3030----
3031
3032**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**