blob: 660c49fa755d08e8829eb458f98a276d2a823b98 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000015- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
16 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
17 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
18 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
19 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
20 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
21 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
22 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +000023 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
24 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
25 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
26 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
27 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000028
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000029- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
30 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
31 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
32 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
33 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
34
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000035- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
36
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000037- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
38 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
39
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000040- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
41 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
42 modified the list.
43
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000044- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
45 functions is now writable.
46
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000047- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
48 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
49 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
50 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
51
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000052- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
53 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
54 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
55 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
56 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000057
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000058- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
59 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
60
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000061Extension modules
62-----------------
63
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000064- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
65
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +000066- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
67 data.
68
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000069- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
70 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
71 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
72 supposed to have been truncated away.
73
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000074- Added socket.socketpair().
75
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +000076- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
77 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
78
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000079Library
80-------
81
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000082- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
83
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +000084- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
85 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +000086
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000087- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
88 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
89
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000090- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
91
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000092- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
93
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000094- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
95
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000096- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
97 Percivall.
98
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000099- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
100 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
101
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000102- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
103 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
104 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000105 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000106
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000107- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
108 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
109 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
110 and exponent.
111
112- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
113
114- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
115 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
116 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
117
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000118- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
119 to the readline module.
120
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000121- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000122 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
123 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000124
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000125- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
126 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
127 contains symlinks.
128
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000129- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
130 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
131
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000132- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
133 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
134 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
135
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000136- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
137 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
138 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
139 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
140 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
141 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
142 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
143 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
144 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
145 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
146 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
147 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
148 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
149
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000150- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
151
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000152Tools/Demos
153-----------
154
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000155- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
156 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
157
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000158- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
159
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000160Build
161-----
162
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000163- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
164 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
165 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
166 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
167 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
168 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
169 plans to do so.
170
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000171- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
172 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
173
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000174- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
175 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
176
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000177- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
178 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
179
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000180- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
181 GNU/k*BSD systems.
182
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000183- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
184 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
185
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000186C API
187-----
188
189Documentation
190-------------
191
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000192- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
193 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
194
195- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
196 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
197 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000198
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000199New platforms
200-------------
201
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000202- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
203
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000204Tests
205-----
206
207Windows
208-------
209
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000210- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
211 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
212 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
213 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
214 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
215 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
216 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
217 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
218 the problem.
219
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000220Mac
221---
222
223
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000224What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
225=================================
226
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000227*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000228
229Core and builtins
230-----------------
231
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000232- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
233 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
234 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
235 sensitive code.
236
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000237- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
238 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
239 @staticmethod
240 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000241 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000242
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000243- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
244 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
245 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
246 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
247 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
248 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
249 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
250 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
251 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
252 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
253 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
254
255 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
256 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
257 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
258 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
259 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
260 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
261 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
262
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000263- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
264 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
265
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000266- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000267 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000268
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000269- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000270 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000271 which was missing for no apparent reason.
272
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000273- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000274 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
275 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
276
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000277- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
278 types that support garbage collection.
279
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000280- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
281
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000282- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
283 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
284 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
285 Jython.
286
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000287- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
288
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000289- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
290 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
291
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000292- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
293 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
294 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000295
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000296- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
297 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
298 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
299
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000300Extension modules
301-----------------
302
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000303- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
304
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000305Library
306-------
307
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000308- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
309 TIS-620
310
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000311- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
312 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
313 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
314 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
315 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
316 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
317 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
318 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
319 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
320 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
321
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000322- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
323
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000324- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
325 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
326 same as when the argument is omitted).
327 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
328
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000329- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
330
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000331- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
332 schemes are offered.
333
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000334- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
335
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000336- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
337 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
338 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
339
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000340- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
341
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000342- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
343 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
344
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000345- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
346 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
347 when dummy_threading is being used.
348
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000349- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
350 from a tarfile.
351
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000352- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000353 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000354
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000355- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
356 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
357 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
358 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
359
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000360- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
361 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
362
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000363- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
364 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
365 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
366 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
367 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
368 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
369 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
370 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
371 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
372 by some other method in progress).
373
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000374- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
375 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
376 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000377
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000378- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
379
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000380- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
381 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
382 AM Kuchling.
383
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000384- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
385 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
386 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
387
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000388- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
389 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
390 instead of unsigned.
391
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000392- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000393 no longer part of the public API.
394
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000395- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
396 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
397 string methods of the same name).
398
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000399- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000400 SF patch 945642.
401
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000402- doctest unittest integration improvements:
403
404 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
405
406 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
407 DocTestSuites.
408
409- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
410 that provide thread-local data.
411
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000412- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
413 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
414
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000415- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
416
417- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
418 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
419 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
420
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000421- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
422
423 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
424 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
425 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000426
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000427 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
428 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
429 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
430 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
431
432 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
433 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
434
435 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
436 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
437 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
438 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
439
440 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
441 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
442 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
443 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
444 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
445
446 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
447 wrapping help output.
448
449 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
450 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
451 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000452
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000453C API
454-----
455
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000456- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
457 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
458 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
459 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
460 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
461 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
462 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
463 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
464 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
465 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
466 its visible semantics have not changed.
467
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000468- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
469 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
470
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000471Documentation
472-------------
473
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000474- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000475
476 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000477 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000478
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000479 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000480
481 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
482
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000483- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000484
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000485Tests
486-----
487
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000488- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000489 platforms that use the Makefile.
490
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000491- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
492 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
493 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
494
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000495
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000496What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
497=================================
498
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000499*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000500
501Core and builtins
502-----------------
503
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000504- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
505 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
506 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
507 objects now (one object instead of three).
508
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000509- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
510 Windows DLLs.
511
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000512- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
513 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000514
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000515- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
516 a new .pyc magic.
517
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000518- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
519 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
520 be there.
521
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000522- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
523 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
524 the LC_NUMERIC category.
525
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000526- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
527 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
528 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
529
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000530- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
531
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000532- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
533 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
534 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000535
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000536- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
537 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
538
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000539- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
540
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000541- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000542 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000543
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000544- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
545
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000546- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
547
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000548- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
549 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
550
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000551- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
552 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
553 Fixes bug #858016 .
554
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000555- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
556 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
557 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
558
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000559- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
560 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
561 improves their performance (about 35%).
562
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000563- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
564 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
565 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
566
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000567- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
568 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
569 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
570 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
571
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000572- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
573 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
574 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
575 length is not known).
576
577- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
578 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000579 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
580 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000581 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
582
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000583- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
584 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
585
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000586- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
587 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
588 keyword arguments.
589
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000590- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
591 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
592 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
593
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000594- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
595 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
596 cases.
597
598- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
599 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
600 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
601 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
602 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
603 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
604 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
605 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
606 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
607 a release build.
608
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000609- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
610 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
611
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000612- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000613 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000614
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000615- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
616 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
617 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
618 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
619 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
620 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
621 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
622 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
623 destroyed.
624
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000625- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
626 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
627 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
628 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
629 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
630 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
631 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
632 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
633
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000634- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
635 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
636 character other than a space.
637
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000638- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
639 by the function object or by the method object, the function
640 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
641 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
642 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
643 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
644 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
645 attributes with the same name.
646
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000647- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
648 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
649 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
650 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
651 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
652 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
653 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
654 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
655 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
656 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
657 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
658 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
659 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
660 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000661
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000662- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
663 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
664 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
665 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
666 This has been repaired.
667
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000668- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
669
670- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
671
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000672- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
673 over a sequence.
674
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000675- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000676 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000677
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000678- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
679
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000680- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
681 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
682 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
683 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
684 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
685 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
686 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
687 records with equal keys is unchanged).
688
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000689- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
690 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
691 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
692
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000693- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
694 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
695 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
696 freelist.
697
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000698- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
699 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
700
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000701- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
702 number.
703
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000704- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
705 a TypeError exception.
706
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000707- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
708 820195.
709
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000710- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
711 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
712 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
713
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000714- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000715 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
716 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000717
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000718- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
719 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
720 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
721
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000722- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
723 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000724 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000725
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000726- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000727 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
728 the first call.
729
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000730
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000731Extension modules
732-----------------
733
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000734- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
735 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
736
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000737- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
738 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
739 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
740 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
741 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
742 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
743 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000744
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000745- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
746
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000747- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
748
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000749- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
750 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
751
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000752- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
753 fewer false positives.
754
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000755- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
756 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
757
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000758- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000759 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
760
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000761- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000762 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000763 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000764 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
765 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000766
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000767- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
768 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
769 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
770 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
771
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000772- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
773 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
774 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
775 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
776 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
777 #897625.
778
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000779- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
780 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
781
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000782- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
783 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
784 and pops on either side of the deque.
785
786- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
787 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
788
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000789- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
790 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
791 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
792 other functions that expect a function argument.
793
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000794- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
795
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000796- os.getsid was added.
797
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000798- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
799 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
800 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
801
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000802- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
803
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000804- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
805
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000806- readline.clear_history was added.
807
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000808- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
809
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000810- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
811
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000812- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
813
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000814- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
815
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000816- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
817
818- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
819
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000820- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
821
822- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
823
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000824- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
825 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
826 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
827
828- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
829 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
830 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
831 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
832 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
833 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
834 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
835
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000836- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
837 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
838 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
839 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000840
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000841- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000842 iterators from a single iterable.
843
844- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
845 of raising a TypeError exception.
846
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000847- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
848 as parameter.
849
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000850Library
851-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000852
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000853- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
854 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
855 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000856
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000857- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
858 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
859 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000860
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000861- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000862
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000863- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
864 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000865
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000866- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
867 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
868
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000869- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
870
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000871- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000872 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000873
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000874- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
875 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
876
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000877- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
878
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000879- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
880 on cygwin and mingw32.
881
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000882- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
883
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000884- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
885 module.
886
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000887- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
888 installation scheme for all platforms.
889
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000890- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000891 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000892
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000893- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
894 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
895 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
896
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000897- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
898 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
899 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
900
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000901- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
902
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000903- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
904
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000905- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
906 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
907
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000908- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
909 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
910 type pattern with the same value exists.
911
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000912- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
913 when run from the command prompt).
914
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000915- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
916 not taken into consideration when caching value.
917
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000918- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
919 default sort).
920
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000921- Added global runctx function to profile module
922
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000923- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
924
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000925- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
926
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000927- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
928
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000929- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000930 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
931 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
932 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
933 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
934 accordingly.
935
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000936- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
937 decoding standards.
938
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000939- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
940 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
941 called for all requests.
942
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000943- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
944 they are passed to the compiler.
945
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000946- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
947 indent, width and depth.
948
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000949- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
950 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
951
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000952- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
953 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
954
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000955- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
956
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000957- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
958
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000959- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
960
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000961- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
962 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
963
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000964- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000965 for better performance.
966
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000967- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000968
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000969- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
970 a string).
971
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000972- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
973
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000974- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
975
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000976- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
977
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000978- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
979
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000980- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
981 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
982 list of fieldnames.
983
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000984- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
985 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
986
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000987- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
988
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000989- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
990 empty lists.
991
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000992- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
993 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
994 and shelves.
995
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000996- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
997 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
998
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000999- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001000 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1001 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001002
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001003- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1004 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001005 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001006
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001007- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001008 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1009 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1010
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001011- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1012 and removed in Py2.4.
1013
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001014- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1015
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001016- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1017
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001018Tools/Demos
1019-----------
1020
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001021- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1022 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1023
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001024- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1025
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001026- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1027 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1028 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1029 destination in situations where both files are given.
1030
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001031- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1032 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1033 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1034 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1035
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001036- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1037
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001038- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1039 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1040 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1041 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1042 now.
1043
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001044- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1045 in effect
1046
1047- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1048 C-c C-h
1049
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001050- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1051 -d option was given.
1052
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001053Build
1054-----
1055
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001056- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1057 build under OS X.
1058
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001059- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1060 --enable-profiling.
1061
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001062- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1063 is configured --with-tsc.
1064
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001065- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1066 on AMD64.
1067
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001068- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1069 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1070
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001071- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1072 removed.
1073
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001074- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1075 supported (see PEP 11).
1076
1077- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1078
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001079- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1080
1081- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1082 (see PEP 11).
1083
1084- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1085 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1086
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001087C API
1088-----
1089
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001090- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1091 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1092 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1093
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001094- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1095 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1096 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1097 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1098
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001099- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1100 generator objects.
1101
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001102- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1103 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001104 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1105 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001106
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001107- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1108 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1109
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001110- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1111 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1112 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1113 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1114 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1115
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001116- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1117 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1118 about 10% faster.
1119
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001120- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1121 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1122
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001123- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1124 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1125 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1126 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1127
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001128Windows
1129-------
1130
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001131- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1132 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1133 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1134 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1135
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001136- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1137 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1138 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1139
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001140
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001141What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1142===============================
1143
1144*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1145
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001146IDLE
1147----
1148
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001149- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1150 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1151 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1152 context-menu actions.
1153
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001154- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1155 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1156 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1157 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1158 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1159 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1160 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1161 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1162 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1163
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001164
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001165What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1166=============================================
1167
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001168*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001169
1170Core and builtins
1171-----------------
1172
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001173- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001174 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001175 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1176
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001177Extension modules
1178-----------------
1179
1180- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1181 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1182 than once. This has been fixed.
1183
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001184- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1185 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1186 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1187 call.
1188
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001189- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1190
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001191Library
1192-------
1193
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001194- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1195 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1196
1197- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1198 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1199 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1200 restored.
1201
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001202IDLE
1203----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001204
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001205- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001206
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001207Build
1208-----
1209
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001210- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1211 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1212
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001213C API
1214-----
1215
1216Windows
1217-------
1218
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001219- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1220 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1221
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001222- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1223
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001224Mac
1225---
1226
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001227- Various fixes to pimp.
1228
1229- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1230
1231- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1232 more problems than it solves.
1233
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001234
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001235What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1236=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001237
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001238*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1239
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001240Core and builtins
1241-----------------
1242
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001243- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1244 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1245
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001246- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1247 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001248 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001249
1250- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1251 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1252 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001253 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001254
1255- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1256 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001257
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001258- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1259 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1260 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1261
1262- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001263 770247.
1264
1265- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001266
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001267Extension modules
1268-----------------
1269
1270- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1271 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1272
1273- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1274
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001275- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1276
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001277- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1278 contained within the _strptime module.
1279
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001280- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1281 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1282
1283- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001284 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1285
1286- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1287 the find_class attribute, if present.
1288
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001289- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001290
1291 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1292 (SF bug 763298).
1293
1294 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001295 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1296 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1297 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001298
1299 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1300
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001301Library
1302-------
1303
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001304- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1305
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001306- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1307 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1308 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1309 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1310 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1311 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1312 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1313 or Tester().
1314
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001315- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1316 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1317 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1318 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1319 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1320 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1321 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1322 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1323 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001324
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001325 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001326
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001327- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1328 weren't before was an oversight.
1329
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001330- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1331 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1332
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001333- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1334 when there are no lines.
1335
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001336- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1337 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1338
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001339- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1340 to child processes.
1341
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001342- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1343
1344- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1345
1346- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1347 xmlrpclib.
1348
1349- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1350 responses.
1351
1352- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1353 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1354
1355- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1356 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1357 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1358
1359- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1360 used as patterns.
1361
1362- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1363 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1364 than Tk 8.3.
1365
1366- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1367
1368- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001369
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001370Tools/Demos
1371-----------
1372
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001373- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1374
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001375- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1376
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001377- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001378
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001379Build
1380-----
1381
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001382- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1383
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001384- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1385
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001386- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1387 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001388
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001389- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1390 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1391 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001392
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001393C API
1394-----
1395
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001396- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1397 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1398
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001399Windows
1400-------
1401
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001402- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1403 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1404 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1405 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1406 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1407 Python exception ::
1408
1409 thread.error: can't start new thread
1410
1411 is raised now.
1412
1413- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1414 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1415 instead of from DLL teardown.
1416
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001417Mac
1418---
1419
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001420- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001421 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001422 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1423 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1424 the executable in the bundle.
1425
1426- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001427
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001428- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1429
1430- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1431 on Panther.
1432
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001433What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1434================================
1435
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001436*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001437
1438Core and builtins
1439-----------------
1440
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001441- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1442 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1443 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1444 with the -i option.
1445
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001446- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1447 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1448
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001449- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1450 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1451
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001452- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1453 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1454 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1455 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1456 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1457 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1458 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1459 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1460 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1461 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1462 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1463 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1464 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001465
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001466- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1467 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1468 embedded in a lambda expression.
1469
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001470- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1471 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1472 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1473 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1474 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1475
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001476- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1477 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1478 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1479
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001480- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1481 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1482
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001483- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1484 It's writable again.
1485
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001486- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1487 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1488 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001489 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001490
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001491- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1492 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1493 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1494
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001495Extension modules
1496-----------------
1497
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001498- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1499 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1500
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001501- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1502 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1503 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1504 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1505
1506- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1507 collection.
1508
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001509- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1510 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1511 unique within a single program run.
1512
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001513- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1514 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1515
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001516- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1517 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1518
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001519- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1520 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001521
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001522- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1523
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001524- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1525 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1526
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001527- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1528 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1529 for many BSD-derived systems.
1530
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001531
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001532Library
1533-------
1534
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001535- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1536 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1537 primary ones:
1538
1539 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1540 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1541 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1542
1543 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1544 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1545 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1546 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1547 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1548 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1549
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001550- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1551 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1552 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1553 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1554 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1555 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1556 argument.
1557
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001558- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1559 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1560 in the archive.
1561
1562- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1563 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1564
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001565- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1566 569574).
1567
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001568- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1569 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1570 no more.
1571
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001572- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1573 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1574 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1575 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1576 code coverage.
1577
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001578- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1579 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1580 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001581 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1582 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001583
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001584- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1585 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1586 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001587 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001588
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001589- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1590
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001591- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1592 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1593 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1594 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1595
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001596- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1597 handling.
1598
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001599- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1600 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1601
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001602- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1603 in socket.py.
1604
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001605- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1606
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001607- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1608 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1609 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1610 opener with proxy support.
1611
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001612- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1613
1614- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1615
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001616Tools/Demos
1617-----------
1618
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001619- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1620
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001621- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1622
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001623- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1624 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001625
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001626- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1627 files.
1628
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001629Build
1630-----
1631
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001632- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001633 different root directory.
1634
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001635C API
1636-----
1637
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001638- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1639 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1640 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1641 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1642 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1643 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1644 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1645 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1646 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1647 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1648
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001649- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1650 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1651 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1652 from Python.
1653
1654
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001655New platforms
1656-------------
1657
1658None this time.
1659
1660Tests
1661-----
1662
1663- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1664 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1665
1666Windows
1667-------
1668
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001669- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1670
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001671- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1672 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1673 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1674 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1675 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1676 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1677 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1678 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1679 that's what it's for.
1680
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001681Mac
1682---
1683
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001684- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1685 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1686 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1687 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001688- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1689 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1690- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001691
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001692SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1693------------------------------------
1694
1695430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1696598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1697622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1698661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1699683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1700697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1701713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1702724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1703727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1704729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1705730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1706731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1707732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1708733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1709735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1710740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1711744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1712745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1713747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1714749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1715751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1716753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1717755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1718757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1719760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1720
1721
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001722What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1723================================
1724
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001725*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001726
1727Core and builtins
1728-----------------
1729
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001730- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1731 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1732
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001733- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1734 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1735 and cannot be strings).
1736
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001737- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1738 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1739 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1740 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1741
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001742- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1743 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1744 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1745 Python itself.
1746
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001747- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1748 the referenced object, if it has one.
1749
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001750- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1751 the thread started at
1752 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1753
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001754- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1755 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1756 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1757 placed on a list index.
1758
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001759- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1760 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1761 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1762 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1763
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001764- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1765 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1766 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1767 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1768 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1769 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1770 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1771
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001772- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1773 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1774 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1775 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1776 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1777
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001778- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1779 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001780
1781- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1782 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1783 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1784 #693195.)
1785
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001786- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1787 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001788
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001789- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001790 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001791 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1792 interpreter executions, would fail.
1793
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001794- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001795 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001796 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001797
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001798Extension modules
1799-----------------
1800
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001801- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1802 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1803 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1804 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1805
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001806- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1807 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1808
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001809- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1810 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1811 and Greg Chapman.)
1812
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001813- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1814 recursively.
1815
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001816- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001817 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1818 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1819 leaks.
1820
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001821- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1822
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001823- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1824 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1825 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1826 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1827 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1828 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1829 #705836.
1830
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001831- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001832 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1833
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001834- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1835 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1836 See SF bug #692416.
1837
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001838- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1839 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1840
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001841- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1842 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1843 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001844
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001845- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001846 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1847 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1848
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001849- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1850 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1851 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1852 timeouts to work properly.
1853
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001854Library
1855-------
1856
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001857- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1858 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1859 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1860 future release.
1861
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001862- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1863 for querying platform dependent features.
1864
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001865- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001866
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001867- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1868 pickle protocol versions.
1869
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001870- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1871 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1872 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1873
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001874- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1875
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001876- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1877 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1878 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1879 modules.
1880
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001881- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1882 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1883 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1884
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001885- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1886 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1887
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001888- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1889 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1890 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1891
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001892- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001893 MS Office extensions.
1894
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001895- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1896 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1897
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001898- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1899 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1900
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001901- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1902 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1903 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1904 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1905 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1906 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1907
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001908- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1909 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1910 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001911
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001912- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1913 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1914 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1915
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001916- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1917
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001918- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1919 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1920 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1921
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001922Tools/Demos
1923-----------
1924
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001925- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1926 See the module docstring for details.
1927
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001928Build
1929-----
1930
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001931- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1932 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001933
1934C API
1935-----
1936
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001937- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1938
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001939- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1940 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1941 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1942
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001943- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1944 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001945
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001946 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1947 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1948 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001949
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001950- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001951 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1952
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001953- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1954 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1955 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001956
1957New platforms
1958-------------
1959
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001960None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001961
1962Tests
1963-----
1964
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001965- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1966 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001967
1968Windows
1969-------
1970
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001971- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1972 function.
1973
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001974- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1975 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001976
1977Mac
1978---
1979
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001980- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1981 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001982
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001983- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1984 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001985
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001986- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1987 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1988 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001989
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001990- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001991 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1992 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001993
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001994- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1995 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001996
1997
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001998What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1999=================================
2000
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002001*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002002
2003Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002004-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002005
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002006- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2007 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2008 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2009
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002010- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2011 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2012 (SF patch #664376.)
2013
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002014- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2015 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2016 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2017 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2018 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2019 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002020 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002021
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002022- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2023 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2024 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2025 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002026 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002027
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002028- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2029 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2030 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2031 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2032 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2033 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2034 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2035 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2036 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2037 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2038 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2039
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002040- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2041 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2042 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2043 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2044 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2045 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2046
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002047- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2048 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2049
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002050- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2051 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2052 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2053 case.)
2054
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002055- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2056 passed as unicode strings.
2057
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002058- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2059 See SF bug #683467.
2060
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002061- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2062 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2063
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002064- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2065
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002066- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2067
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002068- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2069 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2070 arguments.
2071
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002072- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2073 See SF bug #667147.
2074
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002075- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002076 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002077 See SF bug #676155.
2078
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002079- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002080 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002081 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2082 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2083 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2084 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2085 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2086 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002087
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002088Extension modules
2089-----------------
2090
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002091- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2092 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2093 tp_as_number pointer.
2094
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002095- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2096 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2097 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2098 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2099 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2100
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002101- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2102
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002103- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2104
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002105- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002106 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002107 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2108 patch #678531.)
2109
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002110- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2111 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2112
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002113- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2114 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2115
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002116- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2117
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002118- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2119 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2120 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2121
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002122- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2123
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002124- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2125 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2126
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002127- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002128
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002129- datetime changes:
2130
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002131 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2132
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002133 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2134 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2135 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2136 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2137 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2138 now.
2139
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002140 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002141 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2142 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002143
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002144 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002145 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002146 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2147 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2148 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2149 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002150
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002151 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2152 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2153 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002154 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2155
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002156 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2157 by a later example coded by Guido.
2158
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002159 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002160 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2161 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2162 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002163 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2164 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2165
2166 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2167 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2168 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2169 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2170 tzinfo subclass instance.
2171
2172 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2173 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2174 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2175 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2176 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2177 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2178 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2179 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002180
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002181 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2182 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2183 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2184 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2185 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002186 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2187
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002188 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002189
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002190 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2191 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2192 as a naive datetime object.
2193
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002194 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2195 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2196 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2197
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002198 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2199 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2200 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2201 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2202 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2203 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2204 comparison.
2205
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002206 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2207 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2208 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2209 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002210 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002211
2212 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002213
2214 and ::
2215
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002216 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2217
2218 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2219 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2220 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2221 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2222
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002223 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2224 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2225 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2226 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2227 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2228
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002229 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2230 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002231 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2232 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002233
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002234Library
2235-------
2236
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002237- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2238 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2239
2240- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2241 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2242 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2243 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2244 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2245 See PEP 307 for details.
2246
2247- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2248 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2249
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002250- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2251 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002252 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002253 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2254 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002255 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002256
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002257- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2258 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2259
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002260- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2261 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2262 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2263
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002264- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2265
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002266- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2267 exception.
2268
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002269- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2270 class.
2271
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002272- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2273 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2274 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2275
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002276- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2277 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2278
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002279- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002280 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2281 See SF bug #659228.
2282
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002283- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2284 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2285 See SF patch #651082.
2286
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002287- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002288
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002289- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2290 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2291
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002292- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002293 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002294
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002295- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2296 DOS paths from other platforms.
2297
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002298Tools/Demos
2299-----------
2300
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002301- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2302 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2303 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2304 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2305 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2306 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2307 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2308 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2309 example:
2310
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002311 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2312 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002313
2314 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2315
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002316
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002317Build
2318-----
2319
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002320- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2321 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2322 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002323 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2324
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002325 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2326
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002327- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2328 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2329 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2330 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2331 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2332 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2333 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2334 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2335 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2336
2337- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2338 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2339 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2340 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2341
2342- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2343 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2344
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002345C API
2346-----
2347
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002348- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2349 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002350
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002351- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2352 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2353 tp_as_number pointer.
2354
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002355- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2356 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2357 (SF #681367)
2358
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002359- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2360 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2361 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2362 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002363
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002364Tests
2365-----
2366
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002367- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002368 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2369 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2370 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2371 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2372 pydoc.)
2373
2374- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2375
2376- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002378Windows
2379-------
2380
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002381- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2382 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2383 time).
2384
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002385- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2386 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2387
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002388- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2389 release without strong cryptography.
2390
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002391- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002392 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002393
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002394- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2395 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002397Mac
2398---
2399
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002400- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2401 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002402
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002403- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2404 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2405 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002406
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002407- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2408 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002409
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002410- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2411 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2412 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2413 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002414
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002415- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002416 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2417 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2418 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002419
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002420
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002421What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002422=================================
2423
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002424*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002425
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002426Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002427--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002428
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002429- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2430
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002431- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2432 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002433 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002434 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002435 a different meaning than before.
2436
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002437- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002438 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002439 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002440
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002441- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002442 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002443 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002444
2445- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2446 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2447 and deallocation.
2448
2449- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2450 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2451
2452- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2453 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2454 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2455 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2456 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2457
2458- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2459 now detected by the garbage collector.
2460
2461- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2462 [SF bug 519621]
2463
2464- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2465 identifier.
2466
2467- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2468 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2469 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2470 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2471 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2472 [SF bug 563060]
2473
2474- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2475 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2476 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2477 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2478 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2479
2480- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2481 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2482 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2483
2484- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2485
2486- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2487 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2488 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2489 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2490 state of the slots would be lost.)
2491
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002492Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002493-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002494
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002495- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002496 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2497 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2498 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2499 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002500 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2501 Jython 2.1.
2502
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002503- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002504 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002505 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2506 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2507 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2508 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2509 these, see PEP 302.
2510
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002511- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2512 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2513 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2514
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002515- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2516 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2517 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2518
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002519- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2520 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2521 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2522
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002523- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2524 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2525 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2526 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2527 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2528 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2529 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2530 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2531 releases or implementations.
2532
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002533- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002534 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2535 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002536
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002537- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2538 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2539
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002540- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2541 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2542 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2543
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002544- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2545 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2546
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002547- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2548 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002549 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2550 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002551
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002552- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2553 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2554 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2555 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2556 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2557
2558 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2559 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2560 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2561 pattern.
2562
2563 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2564 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2565 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2566 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2567
2568 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2569 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2570 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2571 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2572 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2573 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2574
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002575- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2576 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2577 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2578 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2579 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2580 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2581 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2582 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002583
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002584- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2585 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2586 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2587 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2588 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002589 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2590 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2591 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2592 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2593 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2594 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2595 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002596
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002597- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2598 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2599
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002600- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2601 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2602 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2603 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2604 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2605 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2606 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2607 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2608 to Zack Weinberg!
2609
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002610- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2611 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2612 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2613 type. This has been fixed now.
2614
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002615- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2616 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2617 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2618
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002619- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2620 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2621 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2622 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2623 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2624 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2625 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2626 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002627 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002628
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002629- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2630 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2631 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002632
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002633- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2634 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2635 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2636 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2637 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2638 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2639 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2640 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002641 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002642 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2643 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2644
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002645- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2646 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2647 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2648 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2649 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2650 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2651 this.)
2652
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002653- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2654 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002655 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002656 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002657 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2658 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002659 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2660 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002661
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002662- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2663 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2664 currently running.
2665
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002666- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2667 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2668 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2669 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2670
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002671- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2672 as directory names.
2673
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002674- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2675 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2676
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002677- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2678 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2679
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002680- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002681 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2682 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002683
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002684- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2685 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2686 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2687 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2688 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2689
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002690- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2691 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2692 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2693 removed.
2694
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002695- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2696 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2697 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2698
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002699- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2700 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2701 to __debug__.
2702
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002703- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2704 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2705 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2706
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002707- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2708 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2709 deprecated now.
2710
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002711- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2712 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2713 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002714
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002715- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2716 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2717 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2718 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2719 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002720
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002721- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2722 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2723
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002724- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2725 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2726 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002727 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002728 is backward compatible.
2729
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002730- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2731 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2732 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2733 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2734 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2735
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002736- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2737 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2738 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2739 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2740 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2741 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002742
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002743- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2744 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2745
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002746- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2747 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2748
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002749- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2750 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2751 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2752 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2753 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2754
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002755- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2756 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2757 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2758
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002759- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002760 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2761
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002762- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2763 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2764 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002765
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002766- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2767 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2768
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002769- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2770 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2771 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2772
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002773- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2774
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002775Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002777
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002778- Added three operators to the operator module:
2779 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2780 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2781 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2782
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002783- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2784
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002785- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2786 archives.
2787
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002788- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2789 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2790 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2791
2792 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2793
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002794- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2795 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2796 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002797 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002798
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002799- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2800 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2801 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2802 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002803 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2804 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2805 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2806 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002807
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002808- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2809 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002810
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002811- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2812
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002813- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2814 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2815
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002816- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2817 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2818 supported.
2819
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002820- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2821
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002822- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2823 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002824
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002825- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2826 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2827
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002828- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2829
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002830- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2831 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2832
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002833- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2834 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2835 functions but callable type objects.
2836
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002837- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002838 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002839 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002840
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002841- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2842 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002843
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002844- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2845 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002846
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002847- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2848 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2849 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2850 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2851
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002852- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2853 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002854
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002855- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2856 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2857 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2858 and __imul__.
2859
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002860- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002861 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2862 is called.
2863
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002864- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2865 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2866 interpreter was compiled.
2867
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002868- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2869 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2870 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002871 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002872 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2873 1, not 2.
2874
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002875- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2876 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2877 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2878 limit.
2879
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002880- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2881 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2882 bug #623464.
2883
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002884- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2885 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2886 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2887 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2888
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002889Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002890-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002891
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002892- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2893
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002894- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2895 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2896 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2897 with Python 2.3a2.
2898
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002899- os.path exposes getctime.
2900
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002901- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002902 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002903 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002904 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002905 unit tests of floating point results.
2906
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002907- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2908 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2909 has been increased.
2910
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002911- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2912 executed.
2913
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002914- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2915 postinstallation script.
2916
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002917- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2918 test the current module.
2919
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002920- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002921 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2922 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2923 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2924 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2925
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002926- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002927 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002928 Ward's Optik package.
2929
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002930- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2931 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2932 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2933 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2934
2935- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2936 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002937 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002938
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002939- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2940 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2941 shelf are binary pickles.
2942
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002943- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2944 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2945
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002946- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2947 modules are iterators now.
2948
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002949- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2950 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2951 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2952 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2953 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2954 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002955
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002956- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2957 with their entity value.
2958
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002959- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2960
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002961- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2962 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002963
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002964- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2965 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002966 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002967
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002968- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2969 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2970 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2971 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2972 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2973 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2974 main():
2975
2976 import locale
2977 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2978
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002979- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2980 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2981
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002982- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2983 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2984 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2985 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2986 to the new standard.
2987
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002988- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2989 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2990 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2991 an extension to the database.
2992
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002993- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2994 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2995 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2996 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002997 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002998
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002999- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003000 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003001
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003002- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3003 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3004 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3005 bounded integers.
3006
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003007- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3008 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3009 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3010 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3011 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3012 in existence.
3013
3014 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3015 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3016 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3017 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3018 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3019 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3020
3021 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3022 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3023 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3024 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3025
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003026- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3027 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3028 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3029
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003030- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3031
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003032- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3033 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3034 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3035 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3036
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003037- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3038 argument.
3039
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003040- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3041 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3042 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3043 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3044 [SF patch 560794].
3045
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003046- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3047 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3048 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003049 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3050 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3051 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003052
3053- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3054 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003055
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003056- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3057 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3058 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3059 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003060
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003061- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3062 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3063 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3064 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3065 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3066
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003067- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003068
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003069- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3070
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003071- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3072 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3073 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3074 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3075 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3076 identical to None.
3077
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003078- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3079 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3080 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3081 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3082 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3083 results now.
3084
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003085- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3086 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3087
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003088- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3089 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3090 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3091 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3092 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3093 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3094 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3095 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3096
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003097- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3098
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003099- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3100 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3101
3102- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3103 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3104 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3105 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3106 and other systems.
3107
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003108- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3109 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3110 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3111 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 +00003112 work well with these.
3113
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003114- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3115
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003116- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003117 connections.
3118
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003119- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3120 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3121 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3122
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003123- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3124 sets
3125
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003126- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3127 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3128 name.
3129
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003130- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3131 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3132 passed in.
3133
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003134- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003135 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003136 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3137 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003138
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003139- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3140
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003141- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3142
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003143- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3144 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3145 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3146
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003147- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3148 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3149 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3150 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003151 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003152
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003153- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003154 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003155 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003156
3157- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3158 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3159 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3160
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003161- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003162 the value of its expression argument.
3163
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003164- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3165 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3166 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3167
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003168- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3169 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3170 skipstone browser was included.
3171
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003172- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3173 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3174
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003175Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003176-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003177
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003178- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3179 names in addition to accepting file names.
3180
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003181- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3182 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3183 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3184 still used and useful.)
3185
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003186- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3187 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3188 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3189 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003190
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003191- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3192 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3193 the generated binary.
3194
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003195Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003196-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003197
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003198- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3199
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003200- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3201 except in the hands of experts.
3202
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003203- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003204 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3205 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3206 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003207
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003208- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3209 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3210 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3211 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3212 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3213 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3214 builds.
3215
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003216- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3217 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3218 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3219 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3220 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3221 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3222 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3223 new type.
3224
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003225- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003226
3227 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3228 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3229 positive infinities.
3230
3231 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3232 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3233 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3234 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3235 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3236 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3237 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3238
3239 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3240
3241 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3242
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003243- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3244 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3245 size of the executable.
3246
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003247- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3248 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3249 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3250 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003251
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003252- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3253
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003254- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3255 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3256 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003257
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003258- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3259 well as Unix.
3260
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003261- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3262 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3263 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3264 modules in the README file for details.
3265
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003266C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003268
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003269- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3270 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003271 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003272 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003273 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003274
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003275- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3276 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3277 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3278 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3279 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3280 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003281 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003282 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3283 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3284 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3285 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3286 aligned.)
3287
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003288- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3289 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3290 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3291
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003292- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3293 level.
3294
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003295- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3296 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3297 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3298 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3299 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3300
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003301- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3302 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3303 code.
3304
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003305- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3306 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3307 adjusting for negative indices.
3308
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003309- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3310 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3311 object.
3312
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003313- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3314 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3315 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3316
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003317- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3318 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003319
3320- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3321
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003322- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3323 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3324 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3325 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3326
3327- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3328
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003329- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003330
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003331- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003332 without going through the buffer API.
3333
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003335
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003336- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3337 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3338 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3339 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3340
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003341- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3342 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3343
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003344- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003345 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3346
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003347New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003349
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003350- OpenVMS is now supported.
3351
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003352- AtheOS is now supported.
3353
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003354- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3355
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003356- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3357
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003358Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359-----
3360
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003361- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3362 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3363 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003364
3365Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003367
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003368- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3369 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3370 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3371 bugs.
3372 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003373 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003374 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3375 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003376 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003377
3378- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003379 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003380
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003381- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3382 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3383
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003384- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3385 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003386 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003387 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3388
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003389- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3390 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3391 use files" uninstall option).
3392
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003393- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3394
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003395- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3396 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3397
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003398- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3399 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3400 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3401
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003402- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3403 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3404 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3405 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3406 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003407 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3408 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3409 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003410
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003411- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003412 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003413 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3414 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3415 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3416 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3417 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3418 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3419 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3420 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3421 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3422 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3423 work around.
3424
3425- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3426 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3427 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3428 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3429 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3430 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3431 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3432 specified with O_CREAT too).
3433
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003434Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435----
3436
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003437- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003438
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003439- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3440 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3441 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3442
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003443- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3444 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3445 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3446
3447- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3448 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3449 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3450 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3451 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3452 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3453 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3454 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003455
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003456- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3457 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3458 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003459
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003460- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3461 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3462 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3463 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3464 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003465
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003466- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3467 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3468 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003470- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3471 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003472
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003473- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3474 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3475 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3476 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3477 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003478
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003479- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3480 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3481 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3482
3483- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3484 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3485 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003486
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003487- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3488 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3489 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3490 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003491 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003492
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003493- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3494 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003495
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003496- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3497 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003498
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003499- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003500 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003501 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3502 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003503
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003504
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003505What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003506===============================
3507
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003508*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3509
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003510Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003512
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003513- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3514 with a custom metaclass.
3515
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003516Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003518
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003519- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3520 are proxies.
3521
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003522Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003524
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003525- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3526 very short strings.
3527
3528- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3529 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3530 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3531 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3532 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3533
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003534Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003536
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003537- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3538 close or delete time).
3539
3540- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3541 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3542
3543- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3544
3545- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003546 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003547
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003548Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003550
3551Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003553
3554C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003556
3557New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003559
3560Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003562
3563Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003565
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003566- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3567
3568- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3569 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3570
3571- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3572 deleted at process exit time.
3573
3574- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3575 in backslash.
3576
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003577Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003579
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003580- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3581 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3582 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3583
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003584
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003585What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003586===========================
3587
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3589
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003590Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003592
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003593- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3594 been extensively updated. See
3595
3596 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3597
3598 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3599
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003600- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3601 deleted!
3602
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003603- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3604 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3605 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3606 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3607 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3608
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003609- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3610
3611 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3612 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3613
3614 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3615 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3616 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3617 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3618 supported anyway.
3619
3620 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3621 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3622
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003623- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3624 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3625 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3626 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3627 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003628
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003629- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3630 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3631 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3632
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003633Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003635
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003636- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3637 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3638 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3639 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3640 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3641 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003642 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3643 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3644 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3645 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003646
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003647- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3648 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3649 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3650
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003651Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003653
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003654- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3655
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003656Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003658
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003659- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3660 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3661 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3662 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3663 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3664 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3665
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003666- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3667
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003668- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3669
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003670- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3671
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003672- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3673 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3674 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3675
3676- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3677
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003678Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003680
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003681- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3682 off a search on Google.
3683
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003684Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003686
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003687- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3688 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3689 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3690 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3691 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3692 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3693 other platforms should do likewise.
3694
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003695- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3696 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3697 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3698
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003699C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003701
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003702- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3703 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3704 producing key-value pairs.
3705
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003706- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003707 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003708 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3709 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3710 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3711 previously went unchallenged.
3712
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003713New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003714-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003715
3716Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003718
3719Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003721
3722Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003724
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003725- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3726 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003727
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003728- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3729 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3730 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3731 home.
3732
3733
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003734What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003735===========================
3736
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3738
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003739Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003741
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003742- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3743 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003744
3745 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003746 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003747
3748 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3749 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003750 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003751 This needs to be documented.
3752
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003753- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3754 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3755
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003756- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3757 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3758 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3759
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003760- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3761 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3762
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003763- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3764 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3765 class forbids it).
3766
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003767- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3768 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3769 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3770
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003771- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003773Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003775
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003776- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3777 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003778 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003779
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003780- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3781 (like 1 + '').
3782
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003783Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003784-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003785
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003786- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3787 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3788 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3789 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003790 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003791 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3792
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003793- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3794 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3795 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3796 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3797
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003798- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3799 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003800 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3801 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3802 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003803
3804- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3805 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003806
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003807- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3808 bytes on its input.
3809
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003810Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003812
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003813- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003814 convenience function.
3815
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003816- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3817 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3818 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003819 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3820 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3821 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3822 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3823 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3824 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003825
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003826- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3827 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3828 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3829 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3830
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003831- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3832 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3833 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3834
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003835- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3836 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3837 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3838 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3839
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003840- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3841 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003843 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3844 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3845 new -l and -e options.
3846
3847- statcache is now deprecated.
3848
3849- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3850 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003851 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003852 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3853 time properly taken into account.
3854
3855- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3856 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3857 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3858 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3859
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003860Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003862
3863Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003865
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003866- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3867 is built with libdb3 if available.
3868
3869- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3870
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003871C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003873
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003874- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3875 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3876 PySequence_Size().
3877
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003878- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3879
3880- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3881 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3882 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3883
3884- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3885 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3886
3887- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3888 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3889
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003890New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003891-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003892
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003893- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3894 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3895
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003896- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3897 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3898
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003899- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3900
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003901Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003903
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003904- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3905 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3906
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003907Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003909
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003910Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003912
3913- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3914 removed completely in the next release.
3915
3916- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3917 OSX.
3918
3919- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3920 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3921
3922- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3923
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003924
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003925What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003926===========================
3927
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3929
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003930Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003932
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003933- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003934 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003935 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003936 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3937 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003938 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3939 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003940 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3941 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003942
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003943- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3944 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3945
3946- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3947 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3948
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003949Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003951
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003952- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3953 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3954 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3955 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3956 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3957 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3958 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3959 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3960
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003961- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3962 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3963 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3964 example).
3965
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003966- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003967 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003968 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003969 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003970
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003971- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3972 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3973 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003974 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003975
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003976- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3977 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3978 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3979 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3980 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3981 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3982
3983 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3984
3985 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3986
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003987Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003989
3990- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3991
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003992- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3993
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003994- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3995 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003996
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003997- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3998 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3999 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4000 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4001 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4002 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004003 attributes.
4004
4005- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4006 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4007 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004008
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004009- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4010 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4011 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004012
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004013- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4014 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4015 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004016 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4017 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4018
4019- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4020 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004021
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004022Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004024
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004025- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4026 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4027
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004028- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4029 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4030 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4031 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4032
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004033- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4034 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4035 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4036 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4037
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004038 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4039 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4040 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4041 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4042 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4043 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4044 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4045 without losing information).
4046
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004047- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004048 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4049 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4050 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4051 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4052 module).
4053
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004054 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004055 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4056 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4057 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4058 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004059
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004060- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004061 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4062 encoding.
4063
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004064- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4065 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4066
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004068 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4069
4070- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4071 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4072 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4073 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4074
4075- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4076
4077- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4078 ON, and OFF.
4079
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004080- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4081 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4082
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004083Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004085
4086- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4087 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4088 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004089
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004090- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4091 been added: -X and -E.
4092
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004093Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004095
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004096- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4097 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4098
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004099C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004101
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004102- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4103 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4104 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4105 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4106 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4107
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004108- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4109 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4110 as long) arguments.
4111
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004112- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4113 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4114 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4115 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4116 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4117 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4118
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004119- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4120 input.
4121
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004122New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004124
4125Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004127
4128Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004130
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004131- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4132 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4133 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4134
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004135- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4136 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4137 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004138 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004139
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004140 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4141 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4142 import signal
4143 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004144
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004146 while 1:
4147 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004148 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004149 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4150 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4151 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4152 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004153
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004154
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004155What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4156===========================
4157
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4159
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004160Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004162
4163- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4164 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4165 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4166
4167- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4168 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4169 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4170 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4171 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4172 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4173 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004174
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004175- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004176 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004177 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4178 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4179 associate a docstring with a property.
4180
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004181- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4182 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4183 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4184 other built-in object types.
4185
4186- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4187 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4188 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4189 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4190 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4191
4192- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4193 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4194
4195- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4196 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004197 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004198 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4199 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4200 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4201 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4202 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4203
4204- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4205 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4206 class.
4207
4208- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4209 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4210 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4211 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4212
4213- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4214 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4215 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4216 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4217
4218- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4219 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4220
4221- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4222 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4223 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4224 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4225 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004226 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004227 with the same value as s.
4228
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004229- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4230
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004231Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004233
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004234- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4235
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004236- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4237 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4238 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4239 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4240 objects.
4241
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004242- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4243 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004244 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4245 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4246
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004247- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4248 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4249 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4250
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004251Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004252-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004253
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004254- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4255 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4256 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4257 by the instances.
4258
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004259- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4260 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4261 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4262
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004263- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4264 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4265 before the entire comparison is complete.
4266
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004267- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4268 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4269 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4270
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004271- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4272 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4273 getwriter().
4274
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004275- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4276 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4277
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004278- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004279 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4280 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4281
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004282- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4283 iterable object.
4284
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004285- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4286 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004287
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004288- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4289 authentication.
4290
4291- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4292 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004293
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004294- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004295 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4296 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4297 a sample driver.)
4298
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004299Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004301
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004302- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4303 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4304 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4305 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4306 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4307 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4308 kernel has large file support.
4309
4310- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4311 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4312 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4313 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4314 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4315
4316- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4317 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4318 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4319
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004320C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004322
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004323- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4324 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4325
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004326New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004328
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004329- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4330 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4331
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004332Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004334
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004335- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4336 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4337 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4338 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4339 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4340
4341- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4342 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4343 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4344 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4345
4346- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4347 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4348
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004349Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004351
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004352- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004353 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4354 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004355
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004356
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004357What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4358===========================
4359
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4361
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004362Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004364
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004365- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4366 big to represent as a C double.
4367
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004368- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4369 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4370 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4371 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4372 restriction).
4373
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004374- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4375 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4376 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4377 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4378 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4379
4380 >>> dir([])
4381 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4382 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4383 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4384 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4385 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4386 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4387 'reverse', 'sort']
4388
4389 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4390
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004391- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004392 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4393 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4394 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4395 OverflowError exception.
4396
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004397- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004398 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004399 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4400 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4401 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4402 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4403 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004404 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4406 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4407
4408 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4409 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4410 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4411 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004412
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004413- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004414 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4415 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4416 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4417 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4418 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4419 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4420 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4421 once it is created.
4422
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004423- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4424 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4425 (key, value) pairs.
4426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004427- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004428 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4429 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4430
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004431- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4432 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4433 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4434 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4435 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004436
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004437- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004438 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4439 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4440
4441 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4442
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004443- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004444 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4445
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004446Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004448
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004449- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004450 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4451 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004452
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004453- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4454 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4455 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4456 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4457 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4458 in this area anymore).
4459
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004460- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4461 threading.Timer.
4462
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004463- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4464 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4465
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004466- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004467 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4468
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004469- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004470 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4471 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4472 converted to Python longs.
4473
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004474- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004475 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4476
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004477- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4478 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4479 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4480
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004481Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004483
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004484- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4485 division operators as per PEP 238.
4486
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004487Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004489
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004490- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4491 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4492 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4493 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4494
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004495C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004497
4498- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004499
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004500- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4501 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004502 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4505 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004506 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004508
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004509- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004510 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4511 module:
4512
4513 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004514
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004515 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4516 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004517
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004518 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4519 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004520
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004521 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4522
4523 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4524
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004525- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004526 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4527 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4528 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004529
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004530New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004532
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004533- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4534 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4535 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4536 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4537 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004538
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004539Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004541
4542Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004544
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004545- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4546 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4547 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4548 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004549 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4550 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4551 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4552 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4553 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004554
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004555- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004556 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4557
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004558
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004559What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4560===========================
4561
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4563
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004564Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004565-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004566
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004567- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4568 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4569
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004570- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4571 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4572 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004573
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004574- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4575 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4576 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4577 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004578
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004579- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4580
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004581- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004582
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004583Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004584-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004585
4586- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004587 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004588 the module docstring for details.
4589
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004590Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004592
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004593- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004594 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4595 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4596 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004597
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004598- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4599 Nick Mathewson.
4600
4601Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004603
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004604- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4605 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4606 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4607 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4608 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4609 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4610 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4611 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4612
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004613- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4614 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4615 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4616 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4617
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004618- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4619 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4620 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4621 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4622 come a long way).
4623
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004624- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4625 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4626 write filters for these warnings).
4627
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004628- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4629 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4630 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4631 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4632 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4633
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004634- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4635 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4636 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4637 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4638 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4639 older distribution.
4640
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004641Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004643
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004644- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4645 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004646 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004647
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004648- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4649 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4650 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4651
4652- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4653
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004654- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4655
4656- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4657
4658- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4659
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004660- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004661
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004662- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4663
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004664New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004666
4667C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004669
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004670- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4671 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4672 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4673 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4674 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4675 against buffer overruns.
4676
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004677- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004678 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4679 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004680 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4681 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4682 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4683
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004684- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4685 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4686 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4687 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4688 deprecated.
4689
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004690Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004692
4693- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4694 relevant is found.
4695
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004696
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004697What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004698===========================
4699
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4701
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004702Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004704
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004705- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4706 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4707 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4708 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4709 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4710 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4711 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4712 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004713 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004714 repaired.
4715
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004716- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004717 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004718 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4719 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4720 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4721 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4722 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4723 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4724 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4725 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4726
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004727- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4728 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4729 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4730 leading BMO character).
4731
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004732- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4733 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4734 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4735
4736 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4737 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4738 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004739
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004740 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4741 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4742 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4743 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4744 for various simple to use conversions.
4745
4746 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4747 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004749 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4750 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4751 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4752 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4753 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4754 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4755 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4756 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4757 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4758 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4759 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4760 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4761 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4762 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4763 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004764
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004765- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4766 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4767 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004768 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004769 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004770
4771 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004772 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4773 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4774 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4775 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4776 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004777 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4778 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004779
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004780 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4781 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4782 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004783 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004784
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004785- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4786 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4787 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4788 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4789 floating arithmetic,
4790
4791 x = 9007199254740992.0
4792 print long(x)
4793
4794 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4795 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4796 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4797 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4798 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4799 functions are of good quality).
4800
4801 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4802 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4803 algorithms to break.
4804
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004805- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4806 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4807 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4808 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4809 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4810 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4811 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4812 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4813 order.
4814
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004815- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4816 operation along the most common code paths.
4817
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004818- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4819 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4820
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004821- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4822 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4823 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4824 {}.update(UserDict())
4825
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004826- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4827 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4828 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4829 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4830 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4831 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4832 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4833 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4834
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004835- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004836 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004837
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004838 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004839 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4840 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004841 join() method of strings
4842 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004843 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4844 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004846 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004847
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004848- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4849 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4850
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004851- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4852 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4853
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004854- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4855 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4856 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4857 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4858
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004859- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4860 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004861 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004862 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4863 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004864
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004865- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4866
4867
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004868Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004870
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004871- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004872 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004873 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4874 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4875
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004876- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4877 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4878
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004879- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4880 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4881 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4882 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4883
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004884- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4885 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4886 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4887
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004888- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4889
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004890- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4891
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004892- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4893 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4894 that are still imported into string.py).
4895
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004896- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4897
4898- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4899 Now it does.
4900
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004901- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4902
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004903- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4904 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4905 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4906 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4907 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004908 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4909 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004910
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004911- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4912 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4913 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4914 'help(object)'.
4915
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004916Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004918
4919- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004920 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004921 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4922 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4923
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004924- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004925 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4926 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004927
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004928C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004930
4931- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4932 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933
4934----
4935
4936**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**