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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +000013----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000014
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +000015- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
16 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
17 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
18 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
19 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
20 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
21 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
22 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
23 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
24 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
25 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
26
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +000027- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
28 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
29 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
30 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
31 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
32 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
33
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +000034- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
35 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
36
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +000037- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
38 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
39 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
40 case.)
41
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +000042- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
43 passed as unicode strings.
44
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +000045- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
46 See SF bug #683467.
47
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +000048- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
49 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
50
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +000051- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
52
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000053- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
54
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000055- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
56 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
57 arguments.
58
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000059- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
60 See SF bug #667147.
61
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000062- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +000063 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000064 See SF bug #676155.
65
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000066- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000067 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000068 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
69 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
70 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
71 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
72 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
73 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000074
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000075Extension modules
76-----------------
77
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +000078- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
79
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +000080- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +000081 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +000082 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
83 patch #678531.)
84
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +000085- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
86 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
87
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +000088- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
89 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
90
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +000091- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
92 library.
93
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000094- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
95
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000096- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
97 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
98 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
99
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000100- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
101
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000102- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
103 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
104
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000105- datetime changes:
106
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000107 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
108 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
109 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
110 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
111 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
112 now.
113
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000114 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000115 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
116 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000117
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000118 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000119 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000120 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
121 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
122 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
123 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000124
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000125 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
126 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
127 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000128 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
129
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000130 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
131 by a later example coded by Guido.
132
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000133 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000134 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
135 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
136 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000137 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
138 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
139
140 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
141 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
142 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
143 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
144 tzinfo subclass instance.
145
146 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
147 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
148 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
149 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
150 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
151 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
152 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
153 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000154
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000155 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
156 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
157 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
158 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
159 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
160 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
161 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
162 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
163 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
164 as a naive datetime object.
165
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000166 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
167 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
168 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
169
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000170 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
171 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
172 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
173 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
174 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
175 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
176 comparison.
177
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000178 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
179 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
180 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
181 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
182 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example,
183
184 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
185 and
186 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
187
188 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
189 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
190 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
191 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
192
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000193 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
194 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
195 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
196 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
197 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
198
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000199 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
200 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000201 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
202 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000204Library
205-------
206
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000207- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
208 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
209
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000210- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
211 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
212 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
213
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000214- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
215
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000216- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
217 exception.
218
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000219- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
220 class.
221
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000222- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
223 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
224 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
225
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000226- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
227 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
228
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000229- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
230 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
231 See SF bug #659228.
232
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000233- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
234 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
235 See SF patch #651082.
236
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000237- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000238
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000239- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
240 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
241
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000242- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000243 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000244
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000245Tools/Demos
246-----------
247
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000248- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
249 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
250 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
251 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
252 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
253 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
254 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
255 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
256 example:
257
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000258 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
259 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000260
261 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
262
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000263
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000264Build
265-----
266
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000267- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
268 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
269 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
270 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
271 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
272 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
273 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
274 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
275 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
276
277- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
278 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
279 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
280 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
281
282- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
283 from the Tools/scripts directory.
284
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000285C API
286-----
287
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000288- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
289 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
290 (SF #681367)
291
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000292- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
293 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
294 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
295 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000296
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000297
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000298New platforms
299-------------
300
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000301TBD
302
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000303Tests
304-----
305
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000306TBD
307
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000308Windows
309-------
310
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000311- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
312 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
313
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000314- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
315 release without strong cryptography.
316
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000317- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
318 absolute pathname.
319
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000320- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
321 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
322
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000323Mac
324---
325
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000326- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
327 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000328
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000329- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
330 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
331 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000332
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000333- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
334 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000335
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000336
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000337What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000338=================================
339
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000340*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000341
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000342Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000343--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000344
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000345- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
346
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000347- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
348 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000349 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000350 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000351 a different meaning than before.
352
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000353- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000354 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000355 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000356
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000357- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000358 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000359 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000360
361- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
362 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
363 and deallocation.
364
365- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
366 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
367
368- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
369 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
370 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
371 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
372 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
373
374- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
375 now detected by the garbage collector.
376
377- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
378 [SF bug 519621]
379
380- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
381 identifier.
382
383- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
384 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
385 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
386 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
387 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
388 [SF bug 563060]
389
390- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
391 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
392 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
393 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
394 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
395
396- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
397 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
398 not called. [SF bug #537450]
399
400- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
401
402- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
403 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
404 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
405 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
406 state of the slots would be lost.)
407
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000408Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000409-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000410
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000411- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000412 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
413 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
414 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
415 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000416 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
417 Jython 2.1.
418
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000419- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000420 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000421 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
422 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
423 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
424 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
425 these, see PEP 302.
426
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000427- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
428 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
429 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
430
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000431- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
432 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
433 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
434
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000435- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
436 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
437 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
438
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000439- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
440 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
441 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
442 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
443 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
444 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
445 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
446 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
447 releases or implementations.
448
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000449- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000450 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
451 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000452
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000453- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
454 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
455
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000456- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
457 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
458 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
459
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000460- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
461 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
462
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000463- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
464 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000465 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
466 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000467
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000468- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
469 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
470 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
471 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
472 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
473
474 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
475 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
476 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
477 pattern.
478
479 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
480 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
481 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
482 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
483
484 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
485 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
486 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
487 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
488 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
489 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
490
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000491- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
492 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
493 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
494 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
495 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
496 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
497 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
498 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000499
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000500- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
501 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
502 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
503 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
504 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000505 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
506 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
507 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
508 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
509 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
510 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
511 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000512
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000513- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
514 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
515
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000516- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
517 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
518 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
519 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
520 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
521 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
522 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
523 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
524 to Zack Weinberg!
525
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000526- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
527 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
528 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
529 type. This has been fixed now.
530
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000531- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
532 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
533 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
534
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000535- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
536 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
537 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
538 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
539 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
540 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
541 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
542 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000543 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000544
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000545- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
546 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
547 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000548
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000549- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
550 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
551 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
552 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
553 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
554 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
555 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
556 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000557 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000558 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
559 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
560
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000561- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
562 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
563 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
564 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
565 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
566 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
567 this.)
568
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000569- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
570 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000571 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000572 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000573 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
574 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000575 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
576 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000577
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000578- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
579 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
580 currently running.
581
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000582- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
583 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
584 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
585 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
586
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000587- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
588 as directory names.
589
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000590- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
591 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
592
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000593- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
594 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
595
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000596- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000597 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
598 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000599
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000600- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
601 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
602 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
603 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
604 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
605
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000606- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
607 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
608 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
609 removed.
610
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000611- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
612 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
613 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
614
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000615- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
616 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
617 to __debug__.
618
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000619- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
620 string to the left with zeros. For example,
621 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
622
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000623- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
624 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
625 deprecated now.
626
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000627- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
628 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
629 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000630
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000631- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
632 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
633 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
634 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
635 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000636
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000637- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
638 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
639
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000640- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
641 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
642 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000643 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000644 is backward compatible.
645
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000646- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
647 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
648 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
649 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
650 could access a pointer to freed memory.
651
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000652- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
653 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
654 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
655 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
656 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
657 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000658
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000659- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
660 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
661
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000662- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
663 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
664
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000665- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
666 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
667 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
668 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
669 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
670
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000671- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
672 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
673 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
674
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000675- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000676 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
677
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000678- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
679 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
680 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000681
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000682- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
683 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
684
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000685- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
686 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
687 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
688
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000689- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
690
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000691Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000692-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000693
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000694- Added three operators to the operator module:
695 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
696 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
697 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
698
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000699- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
700
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000701- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
702 archives.
703
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000704- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
705 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
706 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
707
708 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
709
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000710- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
711 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
712 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000713 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000714
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000715- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
716 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
717 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
718 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000719 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
720 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
721 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
722 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000723
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000724- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
725 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000726
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000727- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
728
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000729- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
730 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
731
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000732- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
733 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
734 supported.
735
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000736- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
737
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000738- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
739 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000740
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000741- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
742 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
743
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000744- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
745
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000746- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
747 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
748
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000749- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
750 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
751 functions but callable type objects.
752
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000753- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000754 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000755 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000756
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000757- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
758 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000759
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000760- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
761 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000762
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000763- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
764 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
765 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
766 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
767
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000768- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
769 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000770
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000771- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
772 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
773 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
774 and __imul__.
775
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000776- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000777 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
778 is called.
779
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000780- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
781 been added where available.
782
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000783- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
784 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
785 interpreter was compiled.
786
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000787- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
788 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
789 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000790 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000791 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
792 1, not 2.
793
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000794- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
795 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
796 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
797 limit.
798
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000799- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
800 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
801 bug #623464.
802
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000803- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
804 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
805 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
806 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
807
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000808Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000809-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000810
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000811- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
812
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000813- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
814 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
815 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
816 with Python 2.3a2.
817
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000818- os.path exposes getctime.
819
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000820- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
821 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
822 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
823 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
824 unit tests of floating point results.
825
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000826- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
827 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
828 has been increased.
829
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000830- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
831 executed.
832
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000833- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
834 postinstallation script.
835
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000836- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
837 test the current module.
838
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000839- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
840 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
841 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
842 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
843 this behavior needs to be controlled.
844
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000845- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000846 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000847 Ward's Optik package.
848
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000849- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
850 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
851 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
852 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
853
854- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
855 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000856 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000857
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000858- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
859 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
860 shelf are binary pickles.
861
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000862- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
863 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
864
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000865- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
866 modules are iterators now.
867
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000868- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
869 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
870 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
871 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
872 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
873 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000874
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000875- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
876 with their entity value.
877
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000878- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
879
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000880- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
881 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000882
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000883- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
884 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000885 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000886
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000887- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
888 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
889 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
890 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
891 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
892 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
893 main():
894
895 import locale
896 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
897
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000898- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
899 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
900
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000901- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
902 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
903 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
904 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
905 to the new standard.
906
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000907- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
908 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
909 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
910 an extension to the database.
911
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000912- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
913 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
914 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
915 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000916 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000917
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000918- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000919 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000920
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000921- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
922 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
923 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
924 bounded integers.
925
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000926- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
927 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
928 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
929 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
930 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
931 in existence.
932
933 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
934 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
935 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
936 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
937 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
938 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
939
940 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
941 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
942 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
943 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
944
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000945- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
946 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
947 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
948
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000949- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
950
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000951- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
952 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
953 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
954 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
955
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000956- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
957 argument.
958
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000959- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
960 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
961 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
962 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
963 [SF patch 560794].
964
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000965- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
966 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
967 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000968 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
969 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
970 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000971
972- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
973 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000974
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000975- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
976 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
977 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
978 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000979
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000980- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
981 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
982 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
983 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
984 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
985
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000986- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000987
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000988- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
989
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000990- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
991 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
992 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
993 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
994 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
995 identical to None.
996
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000997- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
998 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
999 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1000 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1001 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1002 results now.
1003
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001004- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1005 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1006
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001007- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1008 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1009 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1010 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1011 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1012 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1013 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1014 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1015
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001016- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1017
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001018- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1019 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1020
1021- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1022 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1023 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1024 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1025 and other systems.
1026
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001027- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1028 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1029 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1030 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 +00001031 work well with these.
1032
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001033- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1034
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001035- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001036 connections.
1037
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001038- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1039 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1040 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1041
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001042- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1043 sets
1044
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001045- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1046 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1047 name.
1048
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001049- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1050 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1051 passed in.
1052
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001053- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001054 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001055 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1056 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001057
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001058- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1059
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001060- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1061
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001062- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1063 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1064 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1065
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001066- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1067 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1068 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1069 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001070 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001071
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001072- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001073 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001074 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001075
1076- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1077 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1078 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1079
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001080- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001081 the value of its expression argument.
1082
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001083- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1084 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1085 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1086
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001087- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1088 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1089 skipstone browser was included.
1090
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001091- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1092 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1093
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001094Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001095-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001096
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001097- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1098 names in addition to accepting file names.
1099
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001100- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1101 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1102 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1103 still used and useful.)
1104
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001105- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1106 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1107 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1108 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001109
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001110- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1111 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1112 the generated binary.
1113
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001114Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001115-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001116
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001117- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1118
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001119- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1120 except in the hands of experts.
1121
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001122- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001123 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1124 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1125 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001126
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001127- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1128 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1129 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1130 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1131 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1132 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1133 builds.
1134
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001135- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1136 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1137 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1138 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1139 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1140 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1141 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1142 new type.
1143
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001144- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001145
1146 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1147 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1148 positive infinities.
1149
1150 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1151 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1152 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1153 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1154 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1155 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1156 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1157
1158 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1159
1160 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1161
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001162- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1163 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1164 size of the executable.
1165
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001166- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1167 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1168 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1169 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001170
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001171- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1172
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001173- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1174 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1175 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001176
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001177- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1178 well as Unix.
1179
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001180- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1181 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1182 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1183 modules in the README file for details.
1184
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001185C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001186-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001187
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001188- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1189 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001190 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001191 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001192 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001193
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001194- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1195 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1196 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1197 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1198 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1199 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1200 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1201 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1202 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1203 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1204 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1205 aligned.)
1206
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001207- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1208 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1209 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1210
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001211- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1212 level.
1213
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001214- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1215 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1216 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1217 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1218 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1219
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001220- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1221 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1222 code.
1223
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001224- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1225 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1226 adjusting for negative indices.
1227
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001228- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1229 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1230 object.
1231
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001232- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1233 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1234 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1235
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001236- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1237 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001238
1239- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1240
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001241- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1242 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1243 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1244 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1245
1246- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1247
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001248- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001249
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001250- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001251 without going through the buffer API.
1252
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001253- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001254
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001255- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1256 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1257 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1258 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1259
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001260- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1261 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1262
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001263- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001264 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1265
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001266New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001267-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001268
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001269- OpenVMS is now supported.
1270
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001271- AtheOS is now supported.
1272
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001273- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1274
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001275- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1276
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001277Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001278-----
1279
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001280- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1281 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1282 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001283
1284Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001285-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001286
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001287- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1288 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1289 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1290 bugs.
1291 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001292 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1293 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1294 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001295 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001296
1297- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001298 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001299
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001300- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1301 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1302
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001303- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1304 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1305 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1306 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1307
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001308- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1309 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1310 use files" uninstall option).
1311
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001312- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1313
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001314- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1315 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1316
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001317- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1318 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1319 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1320
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001321- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1322 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1323 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1324 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1325 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001326 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1327 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1328 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001329
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001330- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001331 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001332 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1333 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1334 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1335 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1336 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1337 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1338 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1339 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1340 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1341 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1342 work around.
1343
1344- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1345 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1346 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1347 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1348 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1349 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1350 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1351 specified with O_CREAT too).
1352
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001353Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001354----
1355
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001356- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001357
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001358- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1359 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1360 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001362- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1363 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1364 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1365
1366- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1367 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1368 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1369 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1370 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1371 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1372 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1373 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001374
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001375- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1376 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1377 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001378
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001379- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1380 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1381 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1382 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1383 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001384
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001385- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1386 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1387 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001388
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001389- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1390 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001391
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001392- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1393 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1394 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1395 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1396 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001397
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001398- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1399 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1400 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1401
1402- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1403 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1404 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001405
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001406- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1407 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1408 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1409 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1410 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001411
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001412- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1413 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001414
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001415- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1416 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001417
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001418- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1419 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1420 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1421 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001422
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001423What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001424===============================
1425
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001426*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1427
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001428Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001429--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001430
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001431- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1432 with a custom metaclass.
1433
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001434Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001435-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001436
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001437- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1438 are proxies.
1439
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001440Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001441-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001442
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001443- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1444 very short strings.
1445
1446- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1447 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1448 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1449 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1450 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1451
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001452Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001453-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001454
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001455- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1456 close or delete time).
1457
1458- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1459 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1460
1461- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1462
1463- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001464 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001465
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001466Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001467-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001468
1469Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001470-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001471
1472C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001473-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001474
1475New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001476-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001477
1478Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001479-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001480
1481Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001482-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001483
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001484- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1485
1486- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1487 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1488
1489- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1490 deleted at process exit time.
1491
1492- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1493 in backslash.
1494
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001495Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001496----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001497
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001498- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1499 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1500 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1501
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001502
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001503What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001504===========================
1505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001506*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1507
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001508Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001509--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001510
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001511- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1512 been extensively updated. See
1513
1514 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1515
1516 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1517
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001518- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1519 deleted!
1520
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001521- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1522 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1523 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1524 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1525 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1526
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001527- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1528
1529 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1530 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1531
1532 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1533 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1534 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1535 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1536 supported anyway.
1537
1538 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1539 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1540
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001541- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1542 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1543 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1544 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1545 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001546
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001547- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1548 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1549 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1550
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001551Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001552-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001553
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001554- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1555 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1556 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1557 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1558 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1559 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001560 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1561 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1562 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1563 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001564
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001565- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1566 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1567 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1568
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001569Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001570-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001571
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001572- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1573
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001574Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001575-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001576
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001577- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1578 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1579 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1580 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1581 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1582 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1583
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001584- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1585
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001586- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1587
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001588- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1589
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001590- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1591 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1592 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1593
1594- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1595
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001596Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001597-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001598
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001599- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1600 off a search on Google.
1601
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001602Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001603-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001604
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001605- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1606 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1607 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1608 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1609 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1610 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1611 other platforms should do likewise.
1612
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001613- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1614 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1615 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1616
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001617C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001618-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001619
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001620- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1621 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1622 producing key-value pairs.
1623
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001624- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001625 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001626 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1627 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1628 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1629 previously went unchallenged.
1630
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001631New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001632-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001633
1634Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001635-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001636
1637Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001638-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001639
1640Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001641----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001642
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001643- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1644 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001645
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001646- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1647 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1648 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1649 home.
1650
1651
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001652What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001653===========================
1654
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1656
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001657Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001658--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001659
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001660- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1661 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001662
1663 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001664 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001665
1666 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1667 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001668 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001669 This needs to be documented.
1670
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001671- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1672 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1673
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001674- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1675 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1676 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1677
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001678- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1679 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1680
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001681- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1682 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1683 class forbids it).
1684
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001685- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1686 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1687 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1688
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001689- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1690
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001691Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001692-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001693
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001694- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1695 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001696 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001697
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001698- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1699 (like 1 + '').
1700
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001701Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001702-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001703
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001704- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1705 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1706 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1707 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001708 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001709 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1710
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001711- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1712 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1713 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1714 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1715
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001716- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1717 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001718 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1719 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1720 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001721
1722- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1723 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001724
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001725- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1726 bytes on its input.
1727
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001728Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001729-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001730
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001731- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001732 convenience function.
1733
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001734- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1735 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1736 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001737 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1738 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1739 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1740 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1741 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1742 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001743
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001744- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1745 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1746 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1747 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1748
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001749- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1750 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1751 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1752
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001753- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1754 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1755 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1756 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1757
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001758- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1759 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001760 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001761 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1762 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1763 new -l and -e options.
1764
1765- statcache is now deprecated.
1766
1767- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1768 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001769 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001770 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1771 time properly taken into account.
1772
1773- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1774 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1775 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1776 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1777
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001778Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001779-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001780
1781Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001782-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001783
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001784- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1785 is built with libdb3 if available.
1786
1787- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1788
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001789C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001790-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001791
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001792- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1793 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1794 PySequence_Size().
1795
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001796- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1797
1798- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1799 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1800 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1801
1802- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1803 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1804
1805- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1806 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1807
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001808New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001809-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001810
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001811- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1812 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1813
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001814- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1815 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1816
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001817- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001819Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001820-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001821
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001822- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1823 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1824
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001825Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001826-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001827
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001828Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001829----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001830
1831- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1832 removed completely in the next release.
1833
1834- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1835 OSX.
1836
1837- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1838 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1839
1840- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1841
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001842
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001843What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001844===========================
1845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001846*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1847
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001848Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001849--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001850
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001851- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001852 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001853 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001854 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1855 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001856 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1857 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001858 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1859 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001860
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001861- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1862 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1863
1864- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1865 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1866
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001867Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001868-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001869
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001870- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1871 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1872 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1873 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1874 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1875 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1876 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1877 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1878
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001879- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1880 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1881 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1882 example).
1883
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001884- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001885 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001886 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001887 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001888
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001889- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1890 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1891 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001892 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001893
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001894- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1895 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1896 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1897 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1898 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1899 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1900
1901 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1902
1903 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1904
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001905Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001906-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001907
1908- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1909
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001910- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1911
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001912- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1913 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001914
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001915- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1916 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1917 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1918 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1919 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1920 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001921 attributes.
1922
1923- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1924 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1925 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001926
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001927- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1928 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1929 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001930
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001931- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1932 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1933 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001934 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1935 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1936
1937- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1938 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001939
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001940Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001941-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001942
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001943- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1944 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1945
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001946- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1947 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1948 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1949 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1950
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001951- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1952 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1953 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1954 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1955
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001956 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1957 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1958 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1959 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1960 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1961 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1962 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1963 without losing information).
1964
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001965- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001966 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1967 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1968 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1969 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1970 module).
1971
1972 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1973 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1974 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1975 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1976 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001977
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001978- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001979 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1980 encoding.
1981
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001982- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1983 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001985- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001986 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1987
1988- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1989 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1990 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1991 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1992
1993- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1994
1995- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1996 ON, and OFF.
1997
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001998- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1999 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2000
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002001Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002002-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002003
2004- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2005 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2006 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002007
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002008- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2009 been added: -X and -E.
2010
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002011Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002013
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002014- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2015 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2016
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002017C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002018-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002019
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002020- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2021 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2022 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2023 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2024 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2025
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002026- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2027 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2028 as long) arguments.
2029
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002030- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2031 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2032 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2033 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2034 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2035 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2036
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002037- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2038 input.
2039
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002040New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002041-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002042
2043Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002044-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002045
2046Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002047-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002048
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002049- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2050 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2051 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2052
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002053- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2054 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2055 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002056 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002058 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2059 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2060 import signal
2061 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002063 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002064 while 1:
2065 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002066 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002067 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2068 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2069 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2070 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002071
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002072
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002073What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2074===========================
2075
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2077
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002078Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002079--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002080
2081- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2082 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2083 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2084
2085- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2086 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2087 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2088 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2089 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2090 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2091 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002092
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002093- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002094 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002095 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2096 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2097 associate a docstring with a property.
2098
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002099- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2100 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2101 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2102 other built-in object types.
2103
2104- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2105 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2106 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2107 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2108 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2109
2110- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2111 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2112
2113- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2114 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002115 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002116 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2117 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2118 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2119 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2120 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2121
2122- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2123 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2124 class.
2125
2126- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2127 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2128 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2129 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2130
2131- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2132 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2133 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2134 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2135
2136- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2137 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2138
2139- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2140 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2141 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2142 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2143 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002144 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002145 with the same value as s.
2146
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002147- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2148
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002149Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002150----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002151
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002152- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2153
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002154- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2155 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2156 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2157 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2158 objects.
2159
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002160- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2161 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002162 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2163 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2164
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002165- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2166 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2167 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2168
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002169Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002170-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002171
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002172- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2173 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2174 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2175 by the instances.
2176
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002177- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2178 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2179 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2180
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002181- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2182 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2183 before the entire comparison is complete.
2184
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002185- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2186 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2187 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2188
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002189- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2190 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2191 getwriter().
2192
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002193- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2194 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2195
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002196- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002197 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2198 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2199
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002200- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2201 iterable object.
2202
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002203- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2204 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002205
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002206- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2207 authentication.
2208
2209- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2210 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002211
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002212- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002213 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2214 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2215 a sample driver.)
2216
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002217Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002218-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002219
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002220- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2221 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2222 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2223 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2224 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2225 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2226 kernel has large file support.
2227
2228- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2229 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2230 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2231 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2232 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2233
2234- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2235 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2236 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2237
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002238C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002239-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002240
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002241- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2242 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2243
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002244New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002245-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002246
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002247- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2248 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2249
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002250Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002251-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002252
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002253- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2254 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2255 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2256 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2257 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2258
2259- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2260 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2261 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2262 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2263
2264- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2265 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2266
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002267Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002268-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002269
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002270- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002271 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2272 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002273
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002274
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002275What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2276===========================
2277
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002278*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2279
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002280Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002281----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002282
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002283- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2284 big to represent as a C double.
2285
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002286- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2287 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2288 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2289 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2290 restriction).
2291
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002292- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2293 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2294 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2295 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2296 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2297
2298 >>> dir([])
2299 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2300 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2301 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2302 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2303 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2304 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2305 'reverse', 'sort']
2306
2307 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2308
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002309- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002310 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2311 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2312 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2313 OverflowError exception.
2314
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002315- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002316 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002317 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2318 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2319 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2320 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2321 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002322 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002323 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2324 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2325
2326 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2327 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2328 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2329 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002330
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002331- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002332 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2333 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2334 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2335 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2336 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2337 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2338 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2339 once it is created.
2340
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002341- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2342 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2343 (key, value) pairs.
2344
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002345- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002346 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2347 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2348
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002349- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2350 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2351 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2352 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2353 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002354
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002355- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002356 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2357 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2358
2359 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2360
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002361- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002362 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2363
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002364Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002366
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002367- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002368 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2369 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002370
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002371- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2372 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2373 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2374 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2375 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2376 in this area anymore).
2377
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002378- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2379 threading.Timer.
2380
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002381- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2382 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2383
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002384- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002385 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2386
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002387- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002388 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2389 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2390 converted to Python longs.
2391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002392- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002393 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2394
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002395- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2396 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2397 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2398
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002399Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002400-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002401
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002402- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2403 division operators as per PEP 238.
2404
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002405Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002406-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002407
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002408- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2409 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2410 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2411 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2412
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002413C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002414-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002415
2416- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002417
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002418- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2419 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002420 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002421
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002422 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2423 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002424 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002425 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002427- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002428 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2429 module:
2430
2431 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002432
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002433 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2434 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002435
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002436 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2437 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002438
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002439 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2440
2441 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2442
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002443- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002444 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2445 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2446 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002447
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002448New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002450
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002451- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2452 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2453 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2454 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2455 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002456
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002457Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002458-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002459
2460Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002461-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002462
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002463- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2464 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2465 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2466 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002467 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2468 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2469 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2470 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2471 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002473- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002474 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2475
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002476
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002477What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2478===========================
2479
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002480*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2481
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002482Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002483-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002484
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002485- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2486 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2487
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002488- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2489 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2490 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002491
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002492- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2493 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2494 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2495 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002496
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002497- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2498
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002499- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002500
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002501Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002502-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002503
2504- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002505 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002506 the module docstring for details.
2507
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002508Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002509-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002510
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002511- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002512 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2513 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2514 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002515
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002516- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2517 Nick Mathewson.
2518
2519Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002520----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002521
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002522- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2523 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2524 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2525 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2526 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2527 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2528 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2529 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2530
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002531- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2532 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2533 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2534 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2535
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002536- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2537 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2538 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2539 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2540 come a long way).
2541
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002542- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2543 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2544 write filters for these warnings).
2545
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002546- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2547 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2548 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2549 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2550 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2551
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002552- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2553 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2554 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2555 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2556 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2557 older distribution.
2558
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002559Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002560-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002561
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002562- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2563 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002564 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002565
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002566- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2567 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2568 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2569
2570- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2571
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002572- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2573
2574- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2575
2576- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2577
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002578- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002579
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002580- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2581
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002582New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002583-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002584
2585C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002586-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002587
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002588- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2589 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2590 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2591 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2592 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2593 against buffer overruns.
2594
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002595- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002596 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2597 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002598 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2599 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2600 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2601
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002602- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2603 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2604 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2605 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2606 deprecated.
2607
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002608Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002609-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002610
2611- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2612 relevant is found.
2613
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002614
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002615What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002616===========================
2617
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2619
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002620Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002621----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002622
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002623- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2624 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2625 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2626 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2627 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2628 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2629 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2630 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002631 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002632 repaired.
2633
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002634- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002635 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002636 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2637 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2638 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2639 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2640 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2641 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2642 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2643 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2644
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002645- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2646 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2647 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2648 leading BMO character).
2649
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002650- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2651 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2652 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2653
2654 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2655 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2656 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002657
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002658 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2659 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2660 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2661 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2662 for various simple to use conversions.
2663
2664 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2665 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2668 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2669 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2670 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2671 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2672 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2673 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2674 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2675 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2676 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2677 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2678 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2679 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2680 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2681 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002682
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002683- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2684 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2685 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002686 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002687 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002688
2689 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002690 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2691 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2692 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2693 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2694 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002695 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2696 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002697
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002698 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2699 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2700 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002701 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002702
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002703- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2704 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2705 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2706 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2707 floating arithmetic,
2708
2709 x = 9007199254740992.0
2710 print long(x)
2711
2712 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2713 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2714 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2715 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2716 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2717 functions are of good quality).
2718
2719 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2720 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2721 algorithms to break.
2722
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002723- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2724 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2725 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2726 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2727 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2728 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2729 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2730 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2731 order.
2732
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002733- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2734 operation along the most common code paths.
2735
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002736- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2737 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2738
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002739- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2740 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2741 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2742 {}.update(UserDict())
2743
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002744- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2745 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2746 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2747 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2748 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2749 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2750 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2751 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2752
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002753- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002754 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002755
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002756 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002757 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2758 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002759 join() method of strings
2760 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002761 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2762 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002763 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002764 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002765
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002766- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2767 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2768
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002769- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2770 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2771
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002772- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2773 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2774 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2775 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2776
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002777- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2778 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002779 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002780 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2781 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002782
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002783- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2784
2785
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002786Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002788
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002789- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002790 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002791 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2792 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2793
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002794- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2795 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2796
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002797- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2798 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2799 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2800 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2801
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002802- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2803 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2804 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2805
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002806- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2807
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002808- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2809
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002810- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2811 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2812 that are still imported into string.py).
2813
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002814- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2815
2816- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2817 Now it does.
2818
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002819- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2820
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002821- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2822 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2823 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2824 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2825 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002826 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2827 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002828
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002829- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2830 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2831 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2832 'help(object)'.
2833
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002834Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002835-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002836
2837- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002838 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002839 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2840 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2841
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002842- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002843 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2844 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002845
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002846C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002847-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002848
2849- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2850 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002851
2852----
2853
2854**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**