blob: f4f918c6f404491738ce34d54a19c3be8ed24d50 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000015- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
16 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
17 was empty.
18
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000019- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
20 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
21
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000022- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
23present).
24
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000025- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
26 codes.
27
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000028- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
29 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
30 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
31
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000032- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
33 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
34
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000035- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000036 (fixes bug #1119418).
37
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000038- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
39
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000040- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
41 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
42
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000043- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
44 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
45 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
46
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000047- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
48
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000049- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
50 reference counts in some error exit cases.
51
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000052- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
53 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
54 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
55 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
56 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
57 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
58 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
59 realloc.
60
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000061- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
62 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
63
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000064- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
65 like their int counterparts.
66
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000067- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
68 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
69 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
70 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
71 for a longer write-up of the problem).
72
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000073- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
74 serializing floats.
75
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000076- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
77 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
78 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
79
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000080- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
81 278.
82
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000083- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
84 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
85 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
86 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000087 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000088 PyNumber_*().
89 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
90
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000091- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
92 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
93 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
94 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
95
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000096- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
97 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
98 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
99 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
100 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
101
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000102- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
103 disabled caused a crash.
104
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000105- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
106 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
107
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000108- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000109 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
110
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000111- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
112
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000113- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000114 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
115 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
116 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000117
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000118- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
119
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000120- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
121 returning None.
122
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000123- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000124 ('\') with a specific error message.
125
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000126- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
127
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000128- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
129 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
130
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000131- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000132 an ferror() call.
133
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000134- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
135 list.sort().
136
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000137- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
138 (2+3) --> (5).
139
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000140- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
141
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000142- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
143 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000144
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000145- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
146 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
147 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
148
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000149- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
150 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
151 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
152
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000153Extension Modules
154-----------------
155
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000156- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
157 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
158
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000159- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
160
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000161- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
162 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
163
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000164- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
165 returns in cStringIO.c.
166
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000167- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
168 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
169
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000170- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
171
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000172- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
173
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000174- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
175 the file system encoding.
176
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000177- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
178 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000179
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000180- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
181
182- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000183 line without newlines.
184
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000185- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
186 on Windows.
187
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000188- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
189 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
190
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000191- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
192 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
193 for large or negative values.
194
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000195- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000196 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000197
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000198- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
199
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000200- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
201 if available on the platform.
202
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000203- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
204 available on the platform.
205
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000206- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
207 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
208
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000209- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
210
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000211- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
212 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
213 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
214
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000215- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
216
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000217- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
218 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
219
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000220- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000221 file size.
222
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000223- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
224
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000225- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
226 {remove_history,replace_history}
227
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000228- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
229 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000230
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000231- stat_float_times is now True.
232
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000233- array.array objects are now picklable.
234
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000235- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
236 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
237
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000238- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
239 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
240 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
241
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000242- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
243 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000244
245Library
246-------
247
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000248- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
249 for padding.
250
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000251- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
252 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
253
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000254- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
255 to get the correct encoding.
256
257- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
258 languages.
259
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000260- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
261
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000262- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
263
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000264- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
265
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000266- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
267 functionality.
268
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000269- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
270
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000271- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
272 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
273
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000274- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
275 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
276 match the Content-Length header.
277
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000278- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
279
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000280- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
281 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
282 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
283
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000284- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
285
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000286- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
287
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000288- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
289 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
290
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000291- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
292 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
293 Tkdnd.
294
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000295- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
296 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
297
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000298- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
299 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
300
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000301- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000302 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
303
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000304- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
305 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
306
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000307- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
308 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
309
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000310- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000311 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000312
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000313- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
314
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000315- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
316 error messages.
317
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000318- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
319
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000320- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
321 Bug #1224621.
322
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000323- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
324 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
325 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
326 terminates by raising StopIteration.
327
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000328- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
329
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000330- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
331 component of the path.
332
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000333- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
334 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
335 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
336 class at all.
337
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000338- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
339 files to PyPI.
340
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000341- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
342 them to PyPI.
343
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000344- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
345 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
346 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
347 work as expected.
348
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000349- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
350 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
351
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000352- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000353 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
354
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000355- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
356
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000357- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
358 to build.
359
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000360- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
361 symbolic links on Windows.
362
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000363- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000364 profile.py if available.
365
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000366- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
367
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000368- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
369 in LWPCookieJar.
370
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000371- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
372
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000373- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
374
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000375- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
376
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000377- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
378
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000379- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
380
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000381- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
382
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000383- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
384
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000385- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
386
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000387- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
388 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
389 be exploited in various ways.
390
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000391- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
392
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000393- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
394
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000395- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
396
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000397- Enhancements to the csv module:
398
399 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000400 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000401 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000402 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
403 reporting.
404 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
405 dictates.
406 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000407 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000408 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000409 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
410 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000411 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
412 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000413 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000414 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
415 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
416 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
417 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
418 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
419 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
420 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
421 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
422 without first creating a dialect class.
423 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
424 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
425 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000426 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000427 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
428 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000429 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
430 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
431 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
432 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000433 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
434 This has been fixed.
435
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000436- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
437 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
438 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
439 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
440
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000441- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
442
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000443- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
444 (Bug #951915).
445
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000446- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
447 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
448 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000449 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000450
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000451- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
452
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000453- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
454 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
455
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000456- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
457
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000458- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
459
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000460- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
461
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000462- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
463
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000464- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
465
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000466- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
467 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
468 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
469
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000470- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000471 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000472
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000473- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
474 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
475 tokenizer with very long source lines.
476
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000477- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
478 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
479
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000480- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
481 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000482
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000483- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
484 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
485
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000486- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
487 correctly.
488
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000489- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
490 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
491 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
492 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
493 between two lines.
494
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000495- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
496 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
497 handlers.
498
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000499- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000500 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
501 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000502
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000503- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
504 considering it exactly like a '*'.
505
506
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000507Build
508-----
509
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000510- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
511 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
512
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000513- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
514 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
515
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000516- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
517 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
518 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000519 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000520
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000521- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
522 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
523 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
524
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000525- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
526
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000527- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
528 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
529
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000530- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
531 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
532 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
533 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
534 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
535 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
536 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
537 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
538
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000539- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
540 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
541 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
542 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
543
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000544
545C API
546-----
547
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000548- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
549
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000550- Removed PyRange_New().
551
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000552
553Tests
554-----
555
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000556- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000557
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000558
559Documentation
560-------------
561
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000562- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
563
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000564- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
565
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000566- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
567
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000568- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
569
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000570- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
571
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000572- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
573
574- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
575
576- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
577
578- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
579
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000580- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
581 Closes bug #1166582.
582
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000583- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
584 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
585 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
586
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000587Mac
588---
589
590
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000591New platforms
592-------------
593
594- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
595
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000596
597Tools/Demos
598-----------
599
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000600- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
601 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
602 source files that need an encoding declaration.
603 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
604
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000605- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
606
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000607- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000608
609
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000610What's New in Python 2.4 final?
611===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000612
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000613*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000614
615Core and builtins
616-----------------
617
618- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
619 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
620 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
621
622
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000623What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
624==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000625
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000626*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000627
628Core and builtins
629-----------------
630
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000631- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
632 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
633 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
634
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000635
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000636Library
637-------
638
639- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
640 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
641 raised is re-raised.
642
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000643- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
644 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
645
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000646- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
647 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
648 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
649 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
650 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
651 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
652 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
653 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
654 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
655 by the slice are recomputed now.
656
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000657- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000658
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000659Build
660-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000661
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000662- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
663 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
664 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000665
666C API
667-----
668
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000669- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
670
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000671
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000672What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
673================================
674
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000675*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000676
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000677License
678-------
679
680The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
681is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
682changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
683Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
684intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
685durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
686the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
687License::
688
689 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
690
691says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
692to Python 2.1.1.
693
694The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
695License Version 2.
696
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000697Core and builtins
698-----------------
699
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000700- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
701 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
702 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
703 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
704 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
705 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
706 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
707 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
708 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
709 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
710
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000711- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000712
713Extension Modules
714-----------------
715
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000716- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
717 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
718 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
719 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000720
721Library
722-------
723
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000724- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
725 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
726 returned.
727
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000728- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
729
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000730- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
731 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
732
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000733- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
734
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000735- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
736 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000737
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000738- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
739
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000740- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
741
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000742- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000743 the source code is updated and reloaded.
744
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000745Build
746-----
747
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000748- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000749
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000750What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
751================================
752
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000753*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000754
755Core and builtins
756-----------------
757
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000758- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000759 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
760
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000761- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
762 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
763 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
764 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
765
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000766- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
767 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
768
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000769- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
770 constant.
771
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000772- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
773 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
774 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
775 large), and to anomalies such as
776 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
777 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
778 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
779 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000780
781Extension modules
782-----------------
783
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000784- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
785 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000786 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
787 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
788 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000789
790Library
791-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000792
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000793- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000794 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000795 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
796 --swig-cpp.
797
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000798- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
799 it is set.
800
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000801- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000802
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000803- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
804 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
805 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
806 Closes bug #1039270.
807
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000808- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000809
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000810 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000811 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
812 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
813 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
814 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
815 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
816 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
817 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
818 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
819 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
820 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
821 + Updates to documentation.
822
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000823- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
824 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
825 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
826 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
827
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000828- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000829
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000830- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
831 applications should use the getmember function.
832
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000833- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
834
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000835- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
836 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
837 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
838 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
839 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
840 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
841 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
842 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
843 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
844
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000845- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
846 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000847 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000848
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000849- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
850 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
851 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
852 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
853 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
854 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
855 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
856 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000857
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000858- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
859 the new public features (of which there are many).
860
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000861- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000862 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
863 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
864 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
865 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000866 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000867
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000868- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
869
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000870- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
871 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
872 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
873 options.
874
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000875- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
876 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
877 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
878 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
879 conditions under which non-string values work.
880
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000881Build
882-----
883
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000884- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
885 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
886 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
887
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000888- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
889 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
890 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
891 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
892 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000893
894C API
895-----
896
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000897- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
898 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
899
900- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
901
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000902- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
903 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
904 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
905 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
906 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
907 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
908 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
909 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
910 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
911
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000912- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
913
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000914- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
915 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
916 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000917
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000918Tests
919-----
920
921- test__locale ported to unittest
922
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000923Mac
924---
925
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000926- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
927 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
928 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000929
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000930Tools/Demos
931-----------
932
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000933- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
934 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
935 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
936 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
937 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000938
939
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000940What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
941=================================
942
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000943*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000944
945Core and builtins
946-----------------
947
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000948- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000949 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
950
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000951- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
952 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
953 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
954 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
955 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
956 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
957 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
958 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000959 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
960 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
961 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
962 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
963 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000964
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000965- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
966 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
967 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
968 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
969 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
970
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000971- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
972
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000973- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
974 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
975
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000976- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
977 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
978 modified the list.
979
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000980- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
981 functions is now writable.
982
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000983- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
984 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
985 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
986 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
987
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000988- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
989 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
990 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
991 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
992 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000993
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000994- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
995 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
996
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000997Extension modules
998-----------------
999
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001000- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1001
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001002- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1003 data.
1004
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001005- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1006 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1007 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1008 supposed to have been truncated away.
1009
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001010- Added socket.socketpair().
1011
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001012- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1013 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1014
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001015- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001016 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1017
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001018Library
1019-------
1020
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001021- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001022 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001023
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001024- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1025 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1026
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001027- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1028 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1029
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001030- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1031
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001032- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1033 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001034
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001035- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1036 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1037
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001038- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1039
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001040- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1041
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001042- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1043
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001044- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1045 Percivall.
1046
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001047- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1048 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1049
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001050- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1051 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1052 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001053 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001054
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001055- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1056 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1057 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1058 and exponent.
1059
1060- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1061
1062- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001063 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001064 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1065
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001066- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1067 to the readline module.
1068
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001069- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001070 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1071 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001072
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001073- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1074 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1075 contains symlinks.
1076
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001077- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1078 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1079
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001080- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1081 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1082 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1083
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001084- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1085 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1086 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1087 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1088 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1089 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1090 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1091 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1092 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1093 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1094 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1095 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1096 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1097
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001098- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1099
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001100Tools/Demos
1101-----------
1102
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001103- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1104 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1105
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001106- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1107
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001108Build
1109-----
1110
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001111- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1112 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1113 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1114 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1115 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1116 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1117 plans to do so.
1118
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001119- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1120 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1121
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001122- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1123 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1124
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001125- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1126 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1127
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001128- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1129 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1130
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001131- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1132 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1133
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001134C API
1135-----
1136
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001137..
1138
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001139Documentation
1140-------------
1141
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001142- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1143 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1144
1145- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1146 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1147 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001148
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001149New platforms
1150-------------
1151
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001152- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1153
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001154Tests
1155-----
1156
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001157..
1158
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001159Windows
1160-------
1161
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001162- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1163 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1164 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1165 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1166 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1167 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1168 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1169 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1170 the problem.
1171
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001172Mac
1173---
1174
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001175..
1176
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001177
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001178What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1179=================================
1180
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001181*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001182
1183Core and builtins
1184-----------------
1185
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001186- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1187 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1188 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1189 sensitive code.
1190
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001191- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001192 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001193
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001194 @staticmethod
1195 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001196
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001197 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001198
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001199- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1200 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1201 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1202 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1203 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1204 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1205 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1206 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1207 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1208 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1209 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1210
1211 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1212 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1213 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1214 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1215 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1216 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1217 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1218
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001219- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1220 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1221
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001222- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001223 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001224
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001225- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001226 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001227 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1228
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001229- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001230 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1231 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1232
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001233- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1234 types that support garbage collection.
1235
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001236- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1237
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001238- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1239 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1240 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1241 Jython.
1242
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001243- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1244
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001245- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1246 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1247
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001248- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1249 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1250 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001251
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001252- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1253 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1254 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1255
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001256Extension modules
1257-----------------
1258
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001259- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1260
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001261Library
1262-------
1263
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001264- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1265 TIS-620
1266
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001267- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1268 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1269 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1270 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1271 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1272 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1273 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1274 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1275 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1276 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1277
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001278- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1279
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001280- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1281 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1282 same as when the argument is omitted).
1283 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1284
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001285- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1286
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001287- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1288 schemes are offered.
1289
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001290- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1291
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001292- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1293 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1294 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1295
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001296- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1297
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001298- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1299 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1300
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001301- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1302 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1303 when dummy_threading is being used.
1304
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001305- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1306 from a tarfile.
1307
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001308- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001309 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001310
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001311- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1312 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1313 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1314 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1315
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001316- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1317 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1318
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001319- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1320 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1321 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1322 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1323 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1324 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1325 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1326 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1327 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1328 by some other method in progress).
1329
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001330- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1331 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1332 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001333
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001334- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1335
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001336- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1337 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1338 AM Kuchling.
1339
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001340- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1341 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1342 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1343
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001344- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1345 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1346 instead of unsigned.
1347
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001348- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001349 no longer part of the public API.
1350
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001351- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1352 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1353 string methods of the same name).
1354
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001355- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001356 SF patch 945642.
1357
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001358- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1359
1360 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1361
1362 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1363 DocTestSuites.
1364
1365- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1366 that provide thread-local data.
1367
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001368- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1369 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1370
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001371- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1372
1373- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1374 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1375 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1376
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001377- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1378
1379 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1380 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1381 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001382
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001383 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1384 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1385 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1386 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1387
1388 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1389 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1390
1391 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1392 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1393 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1394 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1395
1396 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1397 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1398 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1399 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1400 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1401
1402 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1403 wrapping help output.
1404
1405 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1406 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1407 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001408
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001409C API
1410-----
1411
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001412- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1413 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1414 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1415 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1416 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1417 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1418 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1419 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1420 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1421 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1422 its visible semantics have not changed.
1423
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001424- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1425 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1426
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001427Documentation
1428-------------
1429
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001430- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001431
1432 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001433 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001434
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001435 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001436
1437 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1438
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001439- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001440
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001441Tests
1442-----
1443
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001444- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001445 platforms that use the Makefile.
1446
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001447- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1448 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1449 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1450
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001451
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001452What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1453=================================
1454
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001455*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001456
1457Core and builtins
1458-----------------
1459
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001460- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1461 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1462 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1463 objects now (one object instead of three).
1464
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001465- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1466 Windows DLLs.
1467
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001468- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1469 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001470
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001471- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1472 a new .pyc magic.
1473
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001474- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1475 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1476 be there.
1477
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001478- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1479 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1480 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1481
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001482- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1483 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1484 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1485
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001486- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1487
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001488- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1489 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1490 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001491
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001492- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1493 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1494
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001495- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1496
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001497- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001498 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001499
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001500- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1501
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001502- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1503
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001504- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1505 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1506
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001507- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1508 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1509 Fixes bug #858016 .
1510
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001511- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1512 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1513 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1514
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001515- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1516 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1517 improves their performance (about 35%).
1518
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001519- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1520 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1521 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1522
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001523- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1524 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1525 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1526 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1527
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001528- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1529 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001530 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001531 length is not known).
1532
1533- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1534 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001535 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1536 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001537 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1538
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001539- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1540 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1541
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001542- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1543 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1544 keyword arguments.
1545
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001546- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1547 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1548 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1549
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001550- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1551 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1552 cases.
1553
1554- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1555 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1556 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1557 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1558 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1559 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1560 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1561 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1562 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1563 a release build.
1564
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001565- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1566 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1567
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001568- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001569 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001570
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001571- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1572 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1573 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1574 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1575 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1576 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1577 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1578 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1579 destroyed.
1580
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001581- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1582 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1583 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1584 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1585 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1586 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1587 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1588 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1589
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001590- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1591 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1592 character other than a space.
1593
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001594- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1595 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1596 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1597 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1598 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1599 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1600 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1601 attributes with the same name.
1602
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001603- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1604 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1605 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1606 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1607 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1608 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1609 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1610 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1611 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1612 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1613 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1614 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1615 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1616 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001617
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001618- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1619 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1620 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1621 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1622 This has been repaired.
1623
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001624- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1625
1626- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1627
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001628- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1629 over a sequence.
1630
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001631- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001632 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001633
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001634- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1635
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001636- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1637 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1638 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1639 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1640 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1641 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1642 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1643 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1644
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001645- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1646 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1647 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1648
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001649- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1650 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1651 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1652 freelist.
1653
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001654- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1655 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1656
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001657- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1658 number.
1659
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001660- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1661 a TypeError exception.
1662
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001663- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1664 820195.
1665
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001666- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1667 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1668 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1669
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001670- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001671 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1672 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001673
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001674- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1675 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1676 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1677
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001678- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1679 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001680 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001681
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001682- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001683 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1684 the first call.
1685
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001686
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001687Extension modules
1688-----------------
1689
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001690- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1691 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1692
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001693- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1694 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1695 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1696 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1697 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1698 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1699 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001700
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001701- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1702
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001703- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1704
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001705- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1706 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1707
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001708- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1709 fewer false positives.
1710
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001711- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1712 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1713
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001714- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001715 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1716
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001717- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001718 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001719 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001720 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1721 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001722
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001723- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1724 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1725 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1726 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1727
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001728- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1729 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1730 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1731 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1732 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1733 #897625.
1734
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001735- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1736 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1737
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001738- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1739 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1740 and pops on either side of the deque.
1741
1742- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1743 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1744
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001745- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1746 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1747 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1748 other functions that expect a function argument.
1749
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001750- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1751
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001752- os.getsid was added.
1753
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001754- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1755 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1756 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1757
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001758- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1759
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001760- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1761
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001762- readline.clear_history was added.
1763
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001764- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1765
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001766- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1767
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001768- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1769
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001770- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1771
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001772- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1773
1774- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1775
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001776- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1777
1778- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1779
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001780- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1781 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1782 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1783
1784- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1785 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1786 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1787 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1788 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1789 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1790 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1791
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001792- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1793 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1794 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1795 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001796
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001797- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001798 iterators from a single iterable.
1799
1800- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1801 of raising a TypeError exception.
1802
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001803- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1804 as parameter.
1805
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001806Library
1807-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001808
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001809- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1810
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001811- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1812 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1813 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001814
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001815- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1816 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1817 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001818
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001819- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001820
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001821- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1822 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001823
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001824- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1825 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1826
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001827- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1828
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001829- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001830 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001831
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001832- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001833 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001834
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001835- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1836
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001837- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1838 on cygwin and mingw32.
1839
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001840- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1841
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001842- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1843 module.
1844
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001845- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1846 installation scheme for all platforms.
1847
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001848- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001849 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001850
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001851- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1852 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1853 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1854
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001855- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1856 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1857 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1858
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001859- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1860
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001861- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1862
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001863- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1864 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1865
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001866- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1867 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1868 type pattern with the same value exists.
1869
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001870- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1871 when run from the command prompt).
1872
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001873- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1874 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1875
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001876- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1877 default sort).
1878
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001879- Added global runctx function to profile module
1880
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001881- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1882
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001883- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1884
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001885- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1886
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001887- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001888 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1889 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1890 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1891 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1892 accordingly.
1893
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001894- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1895 decoding standards.
1896
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001897- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1898 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1899 called for all requests.
1900
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001901- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1902 they are passed to the compiler.
1903
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001904- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1905 indent, width and depth.
1906
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001907- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1908 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1909
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001910- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1911 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1912
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001913- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1914
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001915- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1916
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001917- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1918
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001919- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1920 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1921
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001922- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001923 for better performance.
1924
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001925- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001926
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001927- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1928 a string).
1929
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001930- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1931
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001932- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1933
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001934- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1935
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001936- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1937
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001938- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1939 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1940 list of fieldnames.
1941
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001942- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1943 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1944
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001945- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1946
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001947- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1948 empty lists.
1949
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001950- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1951 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1952 and shelves.
1953
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001954- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1955 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1956
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001957- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001958 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1959 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001960
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001961- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1962 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001963 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001964
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001965- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001966 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1967 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1968
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001969- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1970 and removed in Py2.4.
1971
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001972- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1973
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001974- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1975
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001976Tools/Demos
1977-----------
1978
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001979- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1980 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1981
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001982- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1983
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001984- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1985 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1986 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1987 destination in situations where both files are given.
1988
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001989- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1990 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1991 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1992 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1993
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001994- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1995
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001996- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1997 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1998 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1999 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2000 now.
2001
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002002- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2003 in effect
2004
2005- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2006 C-c C-h
2007
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002008- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2009 -d option was given.
2010
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002011Build
2012-----
2013
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002014- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2015 build under OS X.
2016
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002017- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2018 --enable-profiling.
2019
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002020- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2021 is configured --with-tsc.
2022
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002023- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2024 on AMD64.
2025
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002026- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2027 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2028
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002029- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2030 removed.
2031
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002032- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2033 supported (see PEP 11).
2034
2035- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2036
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002037- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2038
2039- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2040 (see PEP 11).
2041
2042- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2043 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2044
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002045C API
2046-----
2047
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002048- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2049 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2050 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2051
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002052- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2053 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2054 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2055 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2056
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002057- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2058 generator objects.
2059
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002060- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2061 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002062 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2063 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002064
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002065- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2066 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2067
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002068- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2069 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2070 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2071 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2072 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2073
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002074- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2075 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2076 about 10% faster.
2077
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002078- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2079 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2080
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002081- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2082 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2083 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2084 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2085
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002086Windows
2087-------
2088
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002089- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2090 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2091 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2092 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2093
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002094- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2095 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2096 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2097
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002098
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002099What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2100===============================
2101
2102*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2103
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002104IDLE
2105----
2106
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002107- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2108 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2109 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2110 context-menu actions.
2111
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002112- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2113 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2114 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2115 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2116 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2117 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2118 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2119 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2120 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2121
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002122
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002123What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2124=============================================
2125
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002126*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002127
2128Core and builtins
2129-----------------
2130
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002131- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002132 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002133 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2134
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002135Extension modules
2136-----------------
2137
2138- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2139 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2140 than once. This has been fixed.
2141
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002142- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2143 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2144 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2145 call.
2146
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002147- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2148
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002149Library
2150-------
2151
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002152- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2153 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2154
2155- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2156 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2157 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2158 restored.
2159
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002160IDLE
2161----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002162
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002163- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002164
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002165Build
2166-----
2167
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002168- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2169 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2170
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002171C API
2172-----
2173
2174Windows
2175-------
2176
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002177- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2178 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2179
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002180- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2181
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002182Mac
2183---
2184
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002185- Various fixes to pimp.
2186
2187- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2188
2189- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2190 more problems than it solves.
2191
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002192
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002193What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2194=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002195
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002196*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2197
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002198Core and builtins
2199-----------------
2200
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002201- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2202 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2203
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002204- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2205 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002206 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002207
2208- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2209 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2210 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002211 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002212
2213- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2214 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002215
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002216- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2217 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2218 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2219
2220- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002221 770247.
2222
2223- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002224
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002225Extension modules
2226-----------------
2227
2228- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2229 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2230
2231- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2232
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002233- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2234
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002235- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2236 contained within the _strptime module.
2237
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002238- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2239 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2240
2241- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002242 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2243
2244- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2245 the find_class attribute, if present.
2246
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002247- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002248
2249 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2250 (SF bug 763298).
2251
2252 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002253 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2254 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2255 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002256
2257 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2258
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002259Library
2260-------
2261
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002262- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2263
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002264- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2265 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2266 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2267 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2268 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2269 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2270 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2271 or Tester().
2272
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002273- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2274 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2275 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2276 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2277 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2278 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2279 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2280 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2281 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002282
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002283 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002284
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002285- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2286 weren't before was an oversight.
2287
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002288- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2289 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2290
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002291- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2292 when there are no lines.
2293
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002294- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2295 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2296
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002297- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2298 to child processes.
2299
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002300- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2301
2302- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2303
2304- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2305 xmlrpclib.
2306
2307- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2308 responses.
2309
2310- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2311 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2312
2313- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2314 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2315 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2316
2317- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2318 used as patterns.
2319
2320- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2321 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2322 than Tk 8.3.
2323
2324- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2325
2326- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002327
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002328Tools/Demos
2329-----------
2330
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002331- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2332
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002333- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2334
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002335- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002336
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002337Build
2338-----
2339
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002340- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2341
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002342- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2343
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002344- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2345 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002346
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002347- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2348 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2349 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002350
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002351C API
2352-----
2353
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002354- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2355 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2356
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002357Windows
2358-------
2359
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002360- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2361 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2362 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2363 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2364 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2365 Python exception ::
2366
2367 thread.error: can't start new thread
2368
2369 is raised now.
2370
2371- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2372 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2373 instead of from DLL teardown.
2374
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002375Mac
2376---
2377
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002378- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002379 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002380 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2381 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2382 the executable in the bundle.
2383
2384- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002385
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002386- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2387
2388- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2389 on Panther.
2390
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002391What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2392================================
2393
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002394*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002395
2396Core and builtins
2397-----------------
2398
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002399- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2400 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2401 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2402 with the -i option.
2403
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002404- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2405 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2406
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002407- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2408 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2409
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002410- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2411 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2412 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2413 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2414 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2415 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2416 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2417 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2418 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2419 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2420 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2421 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2422 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002423
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002424- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2425 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2426 embedded in a lambda expression.
2427
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002428- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2429 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2430 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2431 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2432 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2433
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002434- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2435 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2436 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2437
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002438- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2439 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2440
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002441- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2442 It's writable again.
2443
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002444- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2445 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2446 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002447 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002448
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002449- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2450 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2451 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2452
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002453Extension modules
2454-----------------
2455
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002456- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2457 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2458
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002459- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2460 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2461 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2462 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2463
2464- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2465 collection.
2466
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002467- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2468 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2469 unique within a single program run.
2470
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002471- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2472 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2473
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002474- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2475 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2476
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002477- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2478 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002479
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002480- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2481
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002482- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2483 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2484
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002485- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2486 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2487 for many BSD-derived systems.
2488
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002489
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002490Library
2491-------
2492
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002493- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2494 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2495 primary ones:
2496
2497 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2498 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2499 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2500
2501 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2502 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2503 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2504 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2505 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2506 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2507
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002508- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2509 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2510 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2511 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2512 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2513 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2514 argument.
2515
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002516- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2517 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2518 in the archive.
2519
2520- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2521 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2522
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002523- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2524 569574).
2525
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002526- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2527 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2528 no more.
2529
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002530- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2531 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2532 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2533 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2534 code coverage.
2535
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002536- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2537 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2538 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002539 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2540 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002541
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002542- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2543 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2544 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002545 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002546
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002547- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2548
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002549- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2550 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2551 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2552 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2553
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002554- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2555 handling.
2556
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002557- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2558 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2559
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002560- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2561 in socket.py.
2562
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002563- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2564
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002565- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2566 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2567 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2568 opener with proxy support.
2569
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002570- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2571
2572- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2573
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002574Tools/Demos
2575-----------
2576
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002577- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2578
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002579- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2580
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002581- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2582 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002583
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002584- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2585 files.
2586
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002587Build
2588-----
2589
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002590- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002591 different root directory.
2592
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002593C API
2594-----
2595
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002596- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2597 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2598 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2599 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2600 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2601 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2602 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2603 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2604 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2605 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2606
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002607- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2608 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2609 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2610 from Python.
2611
2612
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002613New platforms
2614-------------
2615
2616None this time.
2617
2618Tests
2619-----
2620
2621- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2622 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2623
2624Windows
2625-------
2626
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002627- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2628
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002629- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2630 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2631 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2632 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2633 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2634 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2635 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2636 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2637 that's what it's for.
2638
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002639Mac
2640---
2641
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002642- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2643 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2644 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2645 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002646- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2647 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2648- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002649
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002650SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2651------------------------------------
2652
2653430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2654598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2655622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2656661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2657683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2658697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2659713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2660724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2661727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2662729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2663730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2664731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2665732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2666733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2667735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2668740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2669744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2670745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2671747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2672749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2673751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2674753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2675755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2676757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2677760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2678
2679
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002680What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2681================================
2682
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002683*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002684
2685Core and builtins
2686-----------------
2687
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002688- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2689 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2690
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002691- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2692 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2693 and cannot be strings).
2694
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002695- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2696 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2697 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2698 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2699
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002700- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2701 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2702 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2703 Python itself.
2704
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002705- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2706 the referenced object, if it has one.
2707
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002708- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2709 the thread started at
2710 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2711
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002712- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2713 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2714 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2715 placed on a list index.
2716
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002717- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2718 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2719 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2720 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2721
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002722- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2723 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2724 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2725 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2726 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2727 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2728 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2729
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002730- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2731 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2732 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2733 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2734 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2735
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002736- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2737 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002738
2739- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2740 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2741 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2742 #693195.)
2743
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002744- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2745 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002746
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002747- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002748 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002749 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2750 interpreter executions, would fail.
2751
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002752- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002753 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002754 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002755
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756Extension modules
2757-----------------
2758
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002759- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2760 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2761 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2762 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2763
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002764- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2765 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2766
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002767- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2768 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2769 and Greg Chapman.)
2770
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002771- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2772 recursively.
2773
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002774- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002775 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2776 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2777 leaks.
2778
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002779- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2780
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002781- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2782 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2783 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2784 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2785 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2786 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2787 #705836.
2788
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002789- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002790 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2791
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002792- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2793 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2794 See SF bug #692416.
2795
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002796- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2797 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2798
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002799- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2800 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2801 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002802
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002803- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002804 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2805 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2806
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002807- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2808 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2809 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2810 timeouts to work properly.
2811
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002812Library
2813-------
2814
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002815- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2816 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2817 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2818 future release.
2819
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002820- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2821 for querying platform dependent features.
2822
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002823- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002824
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002825- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2826 pickle protocol versions.
2827
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002828- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2829 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2830 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2831
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002832- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2833
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002834- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2835 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2836 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2837 modules.
2838
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002839- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2840 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2841 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2842
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002843- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2844 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2845
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002846- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2847 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2848 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2849
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002850- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002851 MS Office extensions.
2852
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002853- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2854 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2855
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002856- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2857 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2858
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002859- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2860 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2861 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2862 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2863 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2864 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2865
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002866- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2867 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2868 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002869
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002870- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2871 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2872 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2873
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002874- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2875
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002876- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2877 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2878 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2879
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002880Tools/Demos
2881-----------
2882
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002883- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2884 See the module docstring for details.
2885
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002886Build
2887-----
2888
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002889- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2890 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002891
2892C API
2893-----
2894
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002895- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2896
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002897- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2898 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2899 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2900
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002901- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2902 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002903
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002904 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2905 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2906 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002907
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002908- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002909 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2910
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002911- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2912 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2913 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002914
2915New platforms
2916-------------
2917
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002918None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002919
2920Tests
2921-----
2922
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002923- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2924 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002925
2926Windows
2927-------
2928
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002929- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2930 function.
2931
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002932- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2933 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002934
2935Mac
2936---
2937
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002938- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2939 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002940
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002941- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2942 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002943
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002944- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2945 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2946 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002947
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002948- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002949 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2950 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002951
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002952- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2953 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002954
2955
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002956What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2957=================================
2958
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002959*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002960
2961Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002962-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002963
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002964- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2965 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2966 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2967
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002968- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2969 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2970 (SF patch #664376.)
2971
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002972- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2973 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2974 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2975 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2976 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2977 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002978 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002979
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002980- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2981 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2982 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2983 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002984 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002985
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002986- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2987 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2988 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2989 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2990 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2991 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2992 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2993 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2994 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2995 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2996 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2997
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002998- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2999 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3000 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3001 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3002 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3003 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3004
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003005- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3006 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3007
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003008- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3009 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3010 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3011 case.)
3012
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003013- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3014 passed as unicode strings.
3015
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003016- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3017 See SF bug #683467.
3018
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003019- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3020 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3021
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003022- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3023
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003024- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3025
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003026- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3027 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3028 arguments.
3029
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003030- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3031 See SF bug #667147.
3032
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003033- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003034 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003035 See SF bug #676155.
3036
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003037- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003038 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003039 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3040 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3041 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3042 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3043 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3044 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003045
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003046Extension modules
3047-----------------
3048
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003049- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3050 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3051 tp_as_number pointer.
3052
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003053- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3054 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3055 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3056 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3057 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3058
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003059- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3060
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003061- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3062
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003063- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003064 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003065 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3066 patch #678531.)
3067
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003068- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3069 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3070
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003071- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3072 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3073
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003074- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3075
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003076- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3077 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3078 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3079
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003080- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3081
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003082- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3083 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3084
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003085- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003086
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003087- datetime changes:
3088
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003089 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3090
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003091 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3092 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3093 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3094 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3095 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3096 now.
3097
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003098 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003099 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3100 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003101
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003102 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003103 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003104 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3105 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3106 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3107 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003108
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003109 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3110 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3111 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003112 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3113
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003114 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3115 by a later example coded by Guido.
3116
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003117 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003118 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3119 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3120 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003121 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3122 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3123
3124 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3125 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3126 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3127 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3128 tzinfo subclass instance.
3129
3130 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3131 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3132 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3133 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3134 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3135 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3136 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3137 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003138
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003139 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3140 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3141 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3142 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3143 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003144 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3145
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003146 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003147
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003148 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3149 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3150 as a naive datetime object.
3151
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003152 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3153 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3154 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3155
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003156 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3157 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3158 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3159 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3160 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3161 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3162 comparison.
3163
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003164 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3165 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3166 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3167 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003168 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003169
3170 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003171
3172 and ::
3173
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003174 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3175
3176 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3177 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3178 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3179 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3180
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003181 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3182 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3183 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3184 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3185 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3186
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003187 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3188 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003189 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3190 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003191
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003192Library
3193-------
3194
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003195- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3196 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3197
3198- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3199 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3200 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3201 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3202 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3203 See PEP 307 for details.
3204
3205- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3206 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3207
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003208- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3209 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003210 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003211 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3212 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003213 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003214
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003215- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3216 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3217
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003218- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3219 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3220 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3221
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003222- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3223
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003224- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3225 exception.
3226
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003227- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3228 class.
3229
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003230- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3231 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3232 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3233
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003234- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3235 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3236
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003237- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003238 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3239 See SF bug #659228.
3240
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003241- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3242 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3243 See SF patch #651082.
3244
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003245- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003246
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003247- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3248 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3249
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003250- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003251 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003252
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003253- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3254 DOS paths from other platforms.
3255
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003256Tools/Demos
3257-----------
3258
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003259- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3260 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3261 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3262 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3263 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3264 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3265 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3266 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3267 example:
3268
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003269 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3270 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003271
3272 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3273
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003274
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003275Build
3276-----
3277
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003278- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3279 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3280 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003281 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3282
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003283 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3284
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003285- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3286 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3287 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3288 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3289 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3290 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3291 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3292 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3293 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3294
3295- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3296 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3297 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3298 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3299
3300- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3301 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3302
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003303C API
3304-----
3305
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003306- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3307 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003308
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003309- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3310 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3311 tp_as_number pointer.
3312
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003313- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3314 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3315 (SF #681367)
3316
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003317- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3318 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3319 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3320 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003321
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003322Tests
3323-----
3324
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003325- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003326 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3327 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3328 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3329 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3330 pydoc.)
3331
3332- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3333
3334- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003335
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003336Windows
3337-------
3338
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003339- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3340 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3341 time).
3342
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003343- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3344 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3345
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003346- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3347 release without strong cryptography.
3348
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003349- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003350 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003351
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003352- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3353 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3354
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003355Mac
3356---
3357
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003358- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3359 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003360
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003361- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3362 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3363 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003364
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003365- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3366 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003367
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003368- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3369 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3370 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3371 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003372
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003373- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003374 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3375 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3376 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003378
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003379What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003380=================================
3381
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003382*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003384Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003385--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003386
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003387- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3388
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003389- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3390 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003391 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003392 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003393 a different meaning than before.
3394
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003395- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003396 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003397 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003398
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003399- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003400 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003401 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003402
3403- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3404 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3405 and deallocation.
3406
3407- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3408 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3409
3410- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3411 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3412 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3413 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3414 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3415
3416- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3417 now detected by the garbage collector.
3418
3419- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3420 [SF bug 519621]
3421
3422- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3423 identifier.
3424
3425- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3426 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3427 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3428 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3429 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3430 [SF bug 563060]
3431
3432- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3433 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3434 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3435 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3436 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3437
3438- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3439 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3440 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3441
3442- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3443
3444- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3445 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3446 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3447 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3448 state of the slots would be lost.)
3449
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003450Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003452
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003453- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003454 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3455 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3456 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3457 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003458 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3459 Jython 2.1.
3460
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003461- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003462 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003463 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3464 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3465 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3466 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3467 these, see PEP 302.
3468
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003469- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3470 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3471 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3472
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003473- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3474 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3475 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3476
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003477- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3478 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3479 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3480
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003481- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3482 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3483 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3484 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3485 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3486 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3487 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3488 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3489 releases or implementations.
3490
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003491- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003492 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3493 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003494
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003495- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3496 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3497
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003498- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3499 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3500 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3501
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003502- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3503 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3504
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003505- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3506 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003507 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3508 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003509
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003510- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3511 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3512 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3513 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3514 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3515
3516 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3517 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3518 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3519 pattern.
3520
3521 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3522 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3523 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3524 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3525
3526 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3527 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3528 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3529 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3530 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3531 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3532
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003533- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3534 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3535 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3536 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3537 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3538 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3539 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3540 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003541
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003542- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3543 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3544 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3545 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3546 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003547 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3548 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3549 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3550 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3551 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3552 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3553 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003554
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003555- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3556 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3557
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003558- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3559 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3560 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3561 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3562 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3563 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3564 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3565 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3566 to Zack Weinberg!
3567
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003568- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3569 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3570 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3571 type. This has been fixed now.
3572
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003573- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3574 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3575 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3576
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003577- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3578 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3579 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3580 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3581 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3582 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3583 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3584 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003585 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003586
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003587- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3588 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3589 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003590
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003591- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3592 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3593 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3594 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3595 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3596 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3597 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3598 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003599 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003600 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3601 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3602
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003603- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3604 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3605 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3606 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3607 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3608 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3609 this.)
3610
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003611- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3612 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003613 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003614 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003615 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3616 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003617 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3618 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003619
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003620- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3621 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3622 currently running.
3623
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003624- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3625 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3626 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3627 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3628
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003629- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3630 as directory names.
3631
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003632- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3633 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3634
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003635- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3636 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3637
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003638- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003639 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3640 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003641
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003642- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3643 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3644 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3645 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3646 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3647
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003648- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3649 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3650 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3651 removed.
3652
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003653- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3654 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3655 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3656
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003657- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3658 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3659 to __debug__.
3660
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003661- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3662 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3663 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3664
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003665- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3666 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3667 deprecated now.
3668
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003669- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3670 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3671 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003672
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003673- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3674 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3675 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3676 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3677 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003678
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003679- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3680 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3681
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003682- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3683 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3684 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003685 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003686 is backward compatible.
3687
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003688- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3689 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3690 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3691 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3692 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3693
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003694- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3695 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3696 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3697 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3698 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3699 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003700
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003701- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3702 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3703
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003704- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3705 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3706
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003707- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3708 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3709 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3710 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3711 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3712
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003713- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3714 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3715 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3716
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003717- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003718 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3719
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003720- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3721 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3722 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003723
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003724- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3725 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3726
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003727- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3728 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3729 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3730
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003731- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3732
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003733Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003735
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003736- Added three operators to the operator module:
3737 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3738 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3739 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3740
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003741- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3742
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003743- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3744 archives.
3745
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003746- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3747 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3748 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3749
3750 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3751
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003752- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3753 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3754 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003755 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003756
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003757- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3758 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3759 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3760 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003761 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3762 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3763 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3764 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003765
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003766- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3767 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003768
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003769- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3770
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003771- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3772 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3773
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003774- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3775 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3776 supported.
3777
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003778- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3779
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003780- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3781 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003782
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003783- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3784 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3785
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003786- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3787
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003788- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3789 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3790
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003791- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3792 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3793 functions but callable type objects.
3794
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003795- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003796 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003797 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003798
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003799- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3800 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003801
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003802- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3803 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003804
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003805- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3806 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3807 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3808 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3809
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003810- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3811 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003812
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003813- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3814 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3815 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3816 and __imul__.
3817
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003818- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003819 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3820 is called.
3821
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003822- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3823 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3824 interpreter was compiled.
3825
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003826- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3827 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3828 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003829 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003830 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3831 1, not 2.
3832
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003833- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3834 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3835 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3836 limit.
3837
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003838- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3839 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3840 bug #623464.
3841
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003842- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3843 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3844 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3845 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3846
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003847Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003848-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003849
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003850- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3851
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003852- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3853 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3854 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3855 with Python 2.3a2.
3856
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003857- os.path exposes getctime.
3858
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003859- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003860 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003861 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003862 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003863 unit tests of floating point results.
3864
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003865- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3866 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3867 has been increased.
3868
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003869- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3870 executed.
3871
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003872- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3873 postinstallation script.
3874
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003875- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3876 test the current module.
3877
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003878- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003879 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3880 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3881 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3882 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3883
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003884- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003885 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003886 Ward's Optik package.
3887
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003888- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3889 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3890 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3891 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3892
3893- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3894 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003895 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003896
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003897- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3898 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3899 shelf are binary pickles.
3900
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003901- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3902 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3903
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003904- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3905 modules are iterators now.
3906
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003907- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3908 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3909 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3910 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3911 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3912 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003913
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003914- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3915 with their entity value.
3916
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003917- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3918
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003919- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3920 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003921
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003922- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3923 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003924 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003925
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003926- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3927 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3928 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3929 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3930 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3931 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3932 main():
3933
3934 import locale
3935 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3936
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003937- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3938 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3939
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003940- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3941 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3942 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3943 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3944 to the new standard.
3945
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003946- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3947 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3948 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3949 an extension to the database.
3950
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003951- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3952 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3953 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3954 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003955 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003956
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003957- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003958 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003959
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003960- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3961 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3962 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3963 bounded integers.
3964
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003965- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3966 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3967 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3968 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3969 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3970 in existence.
3971
3972 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3973 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3974 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3975 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3976 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3977 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3978
3979 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3980 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3981 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3982 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3983
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003984- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3985 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3986 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3987
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003988- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3989
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003990- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3991 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3992 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3993 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3994
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003995- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3996 argument.
3997
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003998- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3999 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4000 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4001 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4002 [SF patch 560794].
4003
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004004- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4005 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4006 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004007 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4008 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4009 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004010
4011- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4012 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004013
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004014- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4015 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4016 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4017 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004018
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004019- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4020 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4021 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4022 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4023 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4024
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004025- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004026
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004027- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4028
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004029- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4030 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4031 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4032 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4033 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4034 identical to None.
4035
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004036- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4037 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4038 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4039 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4040 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4041 results now.
4042
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004043- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4044 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4045
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004046- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4047 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4048 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4049 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4050 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4051 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4052 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4053 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4054
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004055- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4056
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004057- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4058 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4059
4060- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4061 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4062 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4063 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4064 and other systems.
4065
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004066- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4067 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4068 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4069 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 +00004070 work well with these.
4071
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004072- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4073
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004074- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004075 connections.
4076
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004077- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4078 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4079 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4080
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004081- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4082 sets
4083
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004084- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4085 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4086 name.
4087
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004088- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4089 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4090 passed in.
4091
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004092- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004093 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004094 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4095 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004096
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004097- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4098
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004099- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4100
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004101- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4102 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4103 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4104
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004105- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4106 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4107 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4108 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004109 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004110
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004111- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004112 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004113 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004114
4115- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4116 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4117 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4118
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004119- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004120 the value of its expression argument.
4121
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004122- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4123 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4124 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4125
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004126- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4127 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4128 skipstone browser was included.
4129
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004130- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4131 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4132
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004133Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004134-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004135
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004136- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4137 names in addition to accepting file names.
4138
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004139- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4140 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4141 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4142 still used and useful.)
4143
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004144- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4145 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4146 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4147 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004148
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004149- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4150 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4151 the generated binary.
4152
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004153Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004155
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004156- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4157
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004158- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4159 except in the hands of experts.
4160
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004161- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004162 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4163 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4164 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004165
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004166- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4167 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4168 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4169 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4170 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4171 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4172 builds.
4173
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004174- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4175 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4176 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4177 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4178 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4179 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4180 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4181 new type.
4182
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004183- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004184
4185 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4186 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4187 positive infinities.
4188
4189 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4190 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4191 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4192 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4193 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4194 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4195 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4196
4197 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4198
4199 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4200
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004201- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4202 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4203 size of the executable.
4204
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004205- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4206 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4207 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4208 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004209
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004210- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4211
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004212- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4213 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4214 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004215
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004216- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4217 well as Unix.
4218
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004219- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4220 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4221 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4222 modules in the README file for details.
4223
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004224C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004226
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004227- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4228 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004229 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004230 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004231 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004232
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004233- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4234 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4235 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4236 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4237 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4238 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004239 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004240 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4241 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4242 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4243 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4244 aligned.)
4245
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004246- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4247 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4248 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4249
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004250- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4251 level.
4252
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004253- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4254 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4255 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4256 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4257 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4258
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004259- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4260 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4261 code.
4262
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004263- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4264 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4265 adjusting for negative indices.
4266
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004267- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4268 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4269 object.
4270
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004271- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4272 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4273 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4274
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004275- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4276 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004277
4278- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4279
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004280- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4281 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4282 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4283 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4284
4285- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4286
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004287- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004288
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004289- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004290 without going through the buffer API.
4291
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004293
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004294- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4295 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4296 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4297 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4298
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004299- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4300 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4301
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004302- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004303 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4304
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004305New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004307
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004308- OpenVMS is now supported.
4309
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004310- AtheOS is now supported.
4311
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004312- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4313
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004314- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4315
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004316Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004317-----
4318
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004319- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4320 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4321 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004322
4323Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004325
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004326- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4327 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4328 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4329 bugs.
4330 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004331 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004332 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4333 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004334 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004335
4336- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004337 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004338
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004339- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4340 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4341
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004342- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4343 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004344 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004345 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4346
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004347- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4348 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4349 use files" uninstall option).
4350
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004351- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4352
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004353- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4354 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4355
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004356- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4357 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4358 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4359
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004360- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4361 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4362 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4363 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4364 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004365 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4366 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4367 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004368
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004369- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004370 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004371 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4372 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4373 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4374 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4375 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4376 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4377 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4378 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4379 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4380 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4381 work around.
4382
4383- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4384 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4385 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4386 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4387 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4388 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4389 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4390 specified with O_CREAT too).
4391
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004392Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393----
4394
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004395- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004396
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004397- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4398 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4399 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4400
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004401- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4402 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4403 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4404
4405- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4406 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4407 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4408 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4409 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4410 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4411 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4412 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004413
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004414- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4415 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4416 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004417
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004418- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4419 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4420 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4421 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4422 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004423
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004424- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4425 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4426 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004427
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004428- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4429 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004430
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004431- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4432 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4433 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4434 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4435 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004436
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004437- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4438 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4439 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4440
4441- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4442 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4443 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004444
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004445- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4446 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4447 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4448 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004449 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004450
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004451- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4452 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004453
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004454- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4455 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004456
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004457- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004458 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004459 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4460 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004461
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004462
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004463What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004464===============================
4465
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4467
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004468Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004469--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004470
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004471- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4472 with a custom metaclass.
4473
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004474Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004476
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004477- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4478 are proxies.
4479
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004480Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004482
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004483- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4484 very short strings.
4485
4486- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4487 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4488 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4489 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4490 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4491
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004492Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004494
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004495- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4496 close or delete time).
4497
4498- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4499 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4500
4501- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4502
4503- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004504 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004505
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004506Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004508
4509Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004511
4512C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004514
4515New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004517
4518Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004520
4521Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004523
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004524- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4525
4526- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4527 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4528
4529- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4530 deleted at process exit time.
4531
4532- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4533 in backslash.
4534
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004535Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004537
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004538- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4539 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4540 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4541
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004542
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004543What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004544===========================
4545
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4547
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004548Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004550
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004551- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4552 been extensively updated. See
4553
4554 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4555
4556 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4557
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004558- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4559 deleted!
4560
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004561- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4562 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4563 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4564 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4565 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4566
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004567- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4568
4569 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4570 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4571
4572 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4573 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4574 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4575 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4576 supported anyway.
4577
4578 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4579 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4580
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004581- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4582 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4583 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4584 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4585 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004586
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004587- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4588 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4589 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4590
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004591Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004592-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004593
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004594- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4595 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4596 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4597 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4598 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4599 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004600 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4601 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4602 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4603 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004604
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004605- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4606 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4607 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4608
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004609Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004611
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004612- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4613
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004614Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004616
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004617- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4618 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4619 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4620 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4621 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4622 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4623
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004624- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4625
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004626- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4627
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004628- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4629
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004630- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4631 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4632 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4633
4634- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4635
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004636Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004637-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004638
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004639- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4640 off a search on Google.
4641
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004642Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004644
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004645- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4646 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4647 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4648 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4649 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4650 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4651 other platforms should do likewise.
4652
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004653- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4654 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4655 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4656
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004657C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004658-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004659
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004660- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4661 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4662 producing key-value pairs.
4663
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004664- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004665 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004666 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4667 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4668 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4669 previously went unchallenged.
4670
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004671New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004672-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004673
4674Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004676
4677Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004678-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004679
4680Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004682
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004683- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4684 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004685
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004686- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4687 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4688 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4689 home.
4690
4691
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004692What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004693===========================
4694
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4696
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004697Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004699
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004700- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4701 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004702
4703 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004704 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004705
4706 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4707 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004708 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004709 This needs to be documented.
4710
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004711- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4712 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4713
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004714- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4715 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4716 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4717
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004718- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4719 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4720
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004721- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4722 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4723 class forbids it).
4724
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004725- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4726 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4727 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4728
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004729- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4730
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004731Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004733
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004734- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4735 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004736 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004737
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004738- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4739 (like 1 + '').
4740
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004741Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004742-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004744- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4745 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4746 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4747 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004748 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004749 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4750
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004751- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4752 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4753 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4754 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4755
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004756- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4757 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004758 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4759 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4760 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004761
4762- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4763 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004764
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004765- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4766 bytes on its input.
4767
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004768Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004769-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004770
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004771- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004772 convenience function.
4773
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004774- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4775 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4776 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004777 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4778 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4779 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4780 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4781 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4782 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004783
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004784- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4785 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4786 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4787 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4788
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004789- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4790 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4791 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4792
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004793- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4794 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4795 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4796 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4797
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004798- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4799 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004801 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4802 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4803 new -l and -e options.
4804
4805- statcache is now deprecated.
4806
4807- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4808 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004810 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4811 time properly taken into account.
4812
4813- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4814 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4815 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4816 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4817
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004818Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004819-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004820
4821Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004822-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004823
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004824- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4825 is built with libdb3 if available.
4826
4827- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4828
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004829C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004831
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004832- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4833 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4834 PySequence_Size().
4835
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004836- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4837
4838- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4839 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4840 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4841
4842- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4843 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4844
4845- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4846 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4847
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004848New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004850
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004851- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4852 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4853
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004854- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4855 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4856
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004857- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4858
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004859Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004861
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004862- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4863 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4864
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004865Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004867
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004868Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004870
4871- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4872 removed completely in the next release.
4873
4874- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4875 OSX.
4876
4877- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4878 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4879
4880- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4881
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004882
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004883What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004884===========================
4885
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004886*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4887
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004888Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004889--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004890
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004891- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004892 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004893 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004894 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4895 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004896 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4897 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004898 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4899 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004900
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004901- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4902 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4903
4904- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4905 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4906
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004907Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004909
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004910- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4911 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4912 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4913 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4914 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4915 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4916 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4917 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4918
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004919- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4920 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4921 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4922 example).
4923
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004924- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004925 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004926 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004927 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004928
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004929- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4930 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4931 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004932 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004933
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004934- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4935 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4936 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4937 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4938 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4939 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4940
4941 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4942
4943 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4944
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004945Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004946-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004947
4948- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4949
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004950- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4951
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004952- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4953 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004954
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004955- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4956 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4957 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4958 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4959 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4960 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004961 attributes.
4962
4963- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4964 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4965 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004966
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004967- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4968 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4969 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004970
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004971- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4972 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4973 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004974 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4975 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4976
4977- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4978 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004979
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004980Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004981-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004982
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004983- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4984 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4985
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004986- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4987 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4988 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4989 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4990
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004991- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4992 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4993 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4994 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4995
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004996 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4997 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4998 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4999 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5000 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5001 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5002 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5003 without losing information).
5004
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005005- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005006 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5007 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5008 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5009 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5010 module).
5011
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005012 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005013 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5014 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5015 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5016 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005017
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005018- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005019 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5020 encoding.
5021
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005022- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5023 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005025- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005026 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5027
5028- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5029 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5030 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5031 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5032
5033- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5034
5035- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5036 ON, and OFF.
5037
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005038- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5039 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5040
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005041Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005042-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005043
5044- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5045 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5046 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005047
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005048- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5049 been added: -X and -E.
5050
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005051Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005052-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005053
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005054- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5055 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5056
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005057C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005058-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005059
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005060- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5061 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5062 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5063 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5064 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5065
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005066- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5067 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5068 as long) arguments.
5069
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005070- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5071 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5072 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5073 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5074 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5075 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5076
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005077- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5078 input.
5079
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005080New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005082
5083Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005085
5086Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005088
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005089- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5090 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5091 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5092
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005093- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5094 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5095 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005096 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005097
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005098 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5099 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5100 import signal
5101 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005102
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005104 while 1:
5105 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005107 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5108 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5109 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5110 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005111
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005112
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005113What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5114===========================
5115
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5117
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005118Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005120
5121- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5122 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5123 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5124
5125- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5126 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5127 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5128 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5129 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5130 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5131 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005132
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005133- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005134 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005135 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5136 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5137 associate a docstring with a property.
5138
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005139- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5140 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5141 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5142 other built-in object types.
5143
5144- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5145 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5146 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5147 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5148 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5149
5150- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5151 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5152
5153- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5154 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005155 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005156 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5157 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5158 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5159 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5160 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5161
5162- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5163 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5164 class.
5165
5166- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5167 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5168 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5169 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5170
5171- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5172 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5173 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5174 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5175
5176- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5177 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5178
5179- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5180 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5181 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5182 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5183 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005184 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005185 with the same value as s.
5186
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005187- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5188
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005189Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005190----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005191
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005192- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5193
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005194- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5195 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5196 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5197 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5198 objects.
5199
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005200- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5201 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005202 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5203 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5204
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005205- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5206 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5207 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5208
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005209Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005210-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005211
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005212- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5213 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5214 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5215 by the instances.
5216
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005217- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5218 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5219 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5220
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005221- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5222 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5223 before the entire comparison is complete.
5224
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005225- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5226 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5227 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5228
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005229- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5230 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5231 getwriter().
5232
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005233- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5234 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5235
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005236- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005237 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5238 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5239
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005240- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5241 iterable object.
5242
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005243- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5244 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005245
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005246- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5247 authentication.
5248
5249- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5250 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005251
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005252- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005253 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5254 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5255 a sample driver.)
5256
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005257Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005259
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005260- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5261 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5262 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5263 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5264 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5265 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5266 kernel has large file support.
5267
5268- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5269 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5270 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5271 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5272 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5273
5274- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5275 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5276 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5277
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005278C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005279-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005280
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005281- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5282 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5283
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005284New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005286
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005287- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5288 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5289
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005290Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005292
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005293- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5294 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5295 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5296 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5297 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5298
5299- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5300 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5301 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5302 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5303
5304- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5305 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5306
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005307Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005308-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005309
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005310- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005311 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5312 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005313
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005314
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005315What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5316===========================
5317
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005318*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5319
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005320Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005321----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005322
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005323- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5324 big to represent as a C double.
5325
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005326- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5327 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5328 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5329 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5330 restriction).
5331
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005332- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5333 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5334 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5335 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5336 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5337
5338 >>> dir([])
5339 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5340 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5341 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5342 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5343 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5344 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5345 'reverse', 'sort']
5346
5347 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5348
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005349- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005350 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5351 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5352 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5353 OverflowError exception.
5354
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005355- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005356 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005357 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5358 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5359 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5360 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5361 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005362 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005363 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5364 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5365
5366 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5367 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5368 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5369 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005370
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005371- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005372 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5373 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5374 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5375 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5376 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5377 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5378 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5379 once it is created.
5380
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005381- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5382 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5383 (key, value) pairs.
5384
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005385- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005386 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5387 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5388
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005389- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5390 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5391 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5392 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5393 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005394
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005395- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005396 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5397 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5398
5399 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5400
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005401- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005402 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5403
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005404Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005405-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005406
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005407- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005408 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5409 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005410
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005411- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5412 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5413 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5414 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5415 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5416 in this area anymore).
5417
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005418- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5419 threading.Timer.
5420
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005421- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5422 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5423
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005424- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005425 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5426
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005427- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005428 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5429 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5430 converted to Python longs.
5431
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005432- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005433 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5434
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005435- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5436 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5437 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5438
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005439Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005440-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005441
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005442- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5443 division operators as per PEP 238.
5444
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005445Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005446-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005447
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005448- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5449 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5450 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5451 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5452
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005453C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005454-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005455
5456- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005457
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005458- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5459 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005460 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005461
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005462 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5463 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005464 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005465 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005466
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005467- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005468 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5469 module:
5470
5471 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005472
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005473 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5474 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005475
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005476 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5477 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005478
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005479 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5480
5481 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5482
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005483- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005484 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5485 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5486 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005487
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005488New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005489-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005490
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005491- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5492 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5493 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5494 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5495 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005496
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005497Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005498-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005499
5500Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005501-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005502
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005503- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5504 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5505 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5506 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005507 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5508 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5509 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5510 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5511 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005512
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005513- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005514 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5515
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005516
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005517What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5518===========================
5519
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005520*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5521
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005522Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005523-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005524
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005525- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5526 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5527
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005528- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5529 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5530 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005531
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005532- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5533 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5534 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5535 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005536
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005537- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5538
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005539- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005540
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005541Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005542-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005543
5544- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005545 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005546 the module docstring for details.
5547
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005548Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005549-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005550
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005551- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005552 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5553 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5554 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005555
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005556- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5557 Nick Mathewson.
5558
5559Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005560----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005561
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005562- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5563 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5564 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5565 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5566 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5567 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5568 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5569 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5570
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005571- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5572 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5573 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5574 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5575
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005576- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5577 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5578 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5579 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5580 come a long way).
5581
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005582- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5583 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5584 write filters for these warnings).
5585
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005586- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5587 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5588 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5589 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5590 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5591
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005592- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5593 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5594 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5595 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5596 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5597 older distribution.
5598
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005599Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005600-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005601
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005602- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5603 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005604 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005605
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005606- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5607 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5608 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5609
5610- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5611
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005612- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5613
5614- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5615
5616- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5617
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005618- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005619
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005620- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5621
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005622New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005623-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005624
5625C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005626-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005627
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005628- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5629 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5630 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5631 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5632 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5633 against buffer overruns.
5634
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005635- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005636 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5637 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005638 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5639 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5640 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5641
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005642- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5643 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5644 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5645 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5646 deprecated.
5647
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005648Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005649-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005650
5651- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5652 relevant is found.
5653
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005654
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005655What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005656===========================
5657
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005658*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5659
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005660Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005661----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005662
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005663- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5664 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5665 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5666 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5667 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5668 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5669 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5670 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005671 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005672 repaired.
5673
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005674- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005675 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005676 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5677 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5678 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5679 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5680 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5681 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5682 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5683 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5684
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005685- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5686 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5687 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5688 leading BMO character).
5689
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005690- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5691 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5692 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5693
5694 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5695 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5696 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005697
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005698 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5699 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5700 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5701 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5702 for various simple to use conversions.
5703
5704 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5705 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5706
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005707 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5708 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5709 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5710 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5711 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5712 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5713 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5714 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5715 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5716 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5717 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5718 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5719 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5720 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5721 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005722
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005723- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5724 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5725 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005726 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005727 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005728
5729 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005730 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5731 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5732 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5733 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5734 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005735 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5736 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005737
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005738 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5739 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5740 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005741 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005742
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005743- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5744 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5745 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5746 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5747 floating arithmetic,
5748
5749 x = 9007199254740992.0
5750 print long(x)
5751
5752 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5753 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5754 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5755 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5756 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5757 functions are of good quality).
5758
5759 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5760 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5761 algorithms to break.
5762
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005763- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5764 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5765 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5766 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5767 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5768 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5769 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5770 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5771 order.
5772
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005773- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5774 operation along the most common code paths.
5775
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005776- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5777 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5778
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005779- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5780 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5781 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5782 {}.update(UserDict())
5783
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005784- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5785 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5786 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5787 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5788 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5789 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5790 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5791 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5792
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005793- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005794 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005795
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005796 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005797 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5798 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005799 join() method of strings
5800 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005801 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5802 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005803 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005804 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005805
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005806- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5807 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5808
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005809- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5810 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5811
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005812- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5813 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5814 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5815 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5816
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005817- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5818 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005819 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005820 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5821 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005822
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005823- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5824
5825
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005826Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005827-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005828
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005829- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005830 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005831 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5832 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5833
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005834- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5835 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5836
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005837- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5838 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5839 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5840 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5841
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005842- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5843 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5844 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5845
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005846- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5847
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005848- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5849
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005850- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5851 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5852 that are still imported into string.py).
5853
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005854- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5855
5856- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5857 Now it does.
5858
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005859- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5860
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005861- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5862 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5863 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5864 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5865 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005866 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5867 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005868
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005869- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5870 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5871 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5872 'help(object)'.
5873
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005874Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005875-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005876
5877- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005878 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005879 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5880 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5881
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005882- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005883 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5884 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005885
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005886C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005887-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005888
5889- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5890 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005891
5892----
5893
5894**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**