blob: 47dd80ee6d5192ec02f04105e23b459a0591b19b [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15Extension modules
16-----------------
17
18Library
19-------
20
21Tools/Demos
22-----------
23
24Build
25-----
26
27C API
28-----
29
30New platforms
31-------------
32
33None this time.
34
35Tests
36-----
37
38- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
39 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
40
41Windows
42-------
43
44Mac
45---
46
47
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000048What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
49================================
50
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +000051*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000052
53Core and builtins
54-----------------
55
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +000056- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
57 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
58
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +000059- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
60 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
61 and cannot be strings).
62
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +000063- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
64 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
65 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
66 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
67
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000068- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
69 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
70 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
71 Python itself.
72
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000073- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
74 the referenced object, if it has one.
75
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000076- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
77 the thread started at
78 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
79
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000080- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
81 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
82 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
83 placed on a list index.
84
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000085- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
86 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
87 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
88 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
89
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000090- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
91 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
92 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
93 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
94 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
95 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
96 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
97
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000098- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
99 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
100 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
101 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
102 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
103
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000104- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
105 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000106
107- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
108 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
109 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
110 #693195.)
111
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000112- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
113 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000114
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000115- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000116 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000117 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
118 interpreter executions, would fail.
119
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000120- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000121 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000122 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000123
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000124Extension modules
125-----------------
126
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000127- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
128 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
129 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
130 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
131
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000132- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
133 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
134
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000135- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
136 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
137 and Greg Chapman.)
138
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000139- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
140 recursively.
141
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000142- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000143 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
144 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
145 leaks.
146
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000147- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
148
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000149- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
150 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
151 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
152 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
153 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
154 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
155 #705836.
156
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000157- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
158 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
159
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000160- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
161 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
162 See SF bug #692416.
163
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000164- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
165 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
166
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000167- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
168 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
169 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000170
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000171- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000172 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
173 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
174
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000175- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
176 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
177 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
178 timeouts to work properly.
179
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000180Library
181-------
182
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000183- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
184 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
185 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
186 future release.
187
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000188- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
189 for querying platform dependent features.
190
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000191- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000192
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000193- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
194 pickle protocol versions.
195
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000196- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
197 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
198 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
199
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000200- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
201
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000202- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
203 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
204 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
205 modules.
206
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000207- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
208 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
209 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
210
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000211- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
212 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
213
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000214- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
215 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
216 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
217
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000218- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000219 MS Office extensions.
220
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000221- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
222 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
223
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000224- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
225 execution speed of expressions and statements.
226
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000227- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
228 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
229 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
230 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
231 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
232 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
233
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000234- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
235 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
236 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000237
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000238- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
239 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
240 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
241
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000242- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
243
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000244- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
245 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
246 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
247
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000248Tools/Demos
249-----------
250
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000251- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
252 See the module docstring for details.
253
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000254Build
255-----
256
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000257- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
258 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000259
260C API
261-----
262
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000263- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
264
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000265- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
266 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
267 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
268
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000269- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
270 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000271
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000272 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
273 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
274 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000275
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000276- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000277 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
278
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000279- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
280 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
281 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000282
283New platforms
284-------------
285
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000286None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000287
288Tests
289-----
290
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000291- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
292 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000293
294Windows
295-------
296
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000297- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
298 function.
299
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000300- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
301 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000302
303Mac
304---
305
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000306- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
307 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000308
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000309- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
310 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000311
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000312- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
313 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
314 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000315
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000316- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000317 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
318 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000319
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000320- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
321 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000322
323
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000324What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
325=================================
326
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000327*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000328
329Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000330-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000331
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000332- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
333 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
334 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
335
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000336- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
337 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
338 (SF patch #664376.)
339
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000340- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
341 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
342 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
343 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
344 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
345 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000346 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000347
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000348- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
349 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
350 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
351 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000352 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000353
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000354- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
355 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
356 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
357 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
358 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
359 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
360 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
361 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
362 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
363 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
364 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
365
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000366- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
367 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
368 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
369 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
370 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
371 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
372
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000373- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
374 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
375
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000376- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
377 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
378 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
379 case.)
380
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000381- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
382 passed as unicode strings.
383
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000384- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
385 See SF bug #683467.
386
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000387- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
388 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
389
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000390- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
391
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000392- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
393
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000394- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
395 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
396 arguments.
397
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000398- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
399 See SF bug #667147.
400
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000401- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000402 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000403 See SF bug #676155.
404
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000405- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000406 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000407 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
408 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
409 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
410 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
411 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
412 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000413
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000414Extension modules
415-----------------
416
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000417- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
418 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
419 tp_as_number pointer.
420
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000421- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
422 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
423 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
424 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
425 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
426
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000427- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
428
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000429- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
430
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000431- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000432 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000433 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
434 patch #678531.)
435
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000436- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
437 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
438
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000439- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
440 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
441
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000442- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
443
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000444- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
445 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
446 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
447
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000448- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
449
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000450- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
451 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
452
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000453- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000454
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000455- datetime changes:
456
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000457 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
458
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000459 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
460 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
461 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
462 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
463 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
464 now.
465
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000466 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000467 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
468 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000469
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000470 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000471 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000472 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
473 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
474 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
475 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000476
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000477 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
478 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
479 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000480 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
481
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000482 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
483 by a later example coded by Guido.
484
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000485 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000486 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
487 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
488 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000489 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
490 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
491
492 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
493 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
494 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
495 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
496 tzinfo subclass instance.
497
498 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
499 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
500 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
501 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
502 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
503 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
504 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
505 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000506
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000507 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
508 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
509 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
510 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
511 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000512 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
513
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000514 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000515
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000516 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
517 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
518 as a naive datetime object.
519
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000520 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
521 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
522 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
523
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000524 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
525 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
526 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
527 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
528 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
529 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
530 comparison.
531
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000532 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
533 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
534 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
535 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000536 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000537
538 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000539
540 and ::
541
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000542 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
543
544 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
545 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
546 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
547 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
548
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000549 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
550 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
551 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
552 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
553 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
554
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000555 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
556 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000557 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
558 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000559
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000560Library
561-------
562
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000563- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
564 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
565
566- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
567 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
568 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
569 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
570 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
571 See PEP 307 for details.
572
573- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
574 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
575
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000576- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
577 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000578 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000579 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
580 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000581 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000582
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000583- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
584 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
585
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000586- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
587 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
588 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
589
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000590- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
591
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000592- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
593 exception.
594
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000595- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
596 class.
597
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000598- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
599 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
600 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
601
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000602- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
603 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
604
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000605- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000606 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
607 See SF bug #659228.
608
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000609- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
610 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
611 See SF patch #651082.
612
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000613- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000614
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000615- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
616 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
617
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000618- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000619 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000620
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000621- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
622 DOS paths from other platforms.
623
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000624Tools/Demos
625-----------
626
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000627- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
628 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
629 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
630 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
631 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
632 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
633 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
634 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
635 example:
636
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000637 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
638 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000639
640 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
641
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000642
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000643Build
644-----
645
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000646- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
647 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
648 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000649 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
650
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000651 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
652
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000653- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
654 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
655 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
656 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
657 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
658 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
659 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
660 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
661 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
662
663- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
664 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
665 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
666 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
667
668- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
669 from the Tools/scripts directory.
670
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000671C API
672-----
673
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000674- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
675 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000676
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000677- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
678 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
679 tp_as_number pointer.
680
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000681- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
682 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
683 (SF #681367)
684
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000685- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
686 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
687 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
688 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000689
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000690Tests
691-----
692
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000693- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000694 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
695 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
696 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
697 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
698 pydoc.)
699
700- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
701
702- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000703
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000704Windows
705-------
706
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000707- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
708 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
709 time).
710
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000711- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
712 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
713
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000714- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
715 release without strong cryptography.
716
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000717- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000718 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000719
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000720- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
721 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
722
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000723Mac
724---
725
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000726- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
727 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000728
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000729- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
730 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
731 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000732
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000733- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
734 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000735
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000736- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
737 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
738 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
739 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000740
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000741- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000742 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
743 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
744 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000745
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000746
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000747What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000748=================================
749
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000750*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000751
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000752Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000753--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000754
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000755- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
756
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000757- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
758 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000759 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000760 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000761 a different meaning than before.
762
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000763- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000764 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000765 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000766
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000767- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000768 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000769 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000770
771- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
772 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
773 and deallocation.
774
775- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
776 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
777
778- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
779 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
780 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
781 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
782 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
783
784- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
785 now detected by the garbage collector.
786
787- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
788 [SF bug 519621]
789
790- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
791 identifier.
792
793- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
794 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
795 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
796 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
797 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
798 [SF bug 563060]
799
800- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
801 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
802 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
803 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
804 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
805
806- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
807 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
808 not called. [SF bug #537450]
809
810- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
811
812- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
813 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
814 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
815 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
816 state of the slots would be lost.)
817
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000818Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000819-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000820
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000821- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000822 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
823 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
824 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
825 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000826 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
827 Jython 2.1.
828
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000829- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000830 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000831 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
832 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
833 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
834 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
835 these, see PEP 302.
836
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000837- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
838 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
839 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
840
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000841- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
842 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
843 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
844
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000845- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
846 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
847 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
848
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000849- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
850 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
851 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
852 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
853 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
854 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
855 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
856 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
857 releases or implementations.
858
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000859- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000860 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
861 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000862
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000863- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
864 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
865
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000866- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
867 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
868 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
869
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000870- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
871 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
872
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000873- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
874 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000875 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
876 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000877
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000878- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
879 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
880 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
881 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
882 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
883
884 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
885 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
886 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
887 pattern.
888
889 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
890 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
891 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
892 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
893
894 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
895 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
896 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
897 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
898 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
899 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
900
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000901- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
902 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
903 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
904 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
905 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
906 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
907 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
908 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000909
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000910- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
911 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
912 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
913 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
914 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000915 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
916 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
917 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
918 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
919 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
920 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
921 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000922
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000923- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
924 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
925
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000926- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
927 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
928 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
929 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
930 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
931 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
932 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
933 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
934 to Zack Weinberg!
935
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000936- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
937 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
938 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
939 type. This has been fixed now.
940
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000941- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
942 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
943 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
944
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000945- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
946 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
947 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
948 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
949 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
950 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
951 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
952 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000953 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000954
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000955- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
956 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
957 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000958
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000959- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
960 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
961 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
962 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
963 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
964 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
965 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
966 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000967 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000968 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
969 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
970
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000971- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
972 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
973 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
974 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
975 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
976 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
977 this.)
978
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000979- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
980 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000981 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000982 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000983 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
984 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000985 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
986 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000987
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000988- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
989 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
990 currently running.
991
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000992- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
993 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
994 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
995 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
996
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000997- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
998 as directory names.
999
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001000- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1001 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1002
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001003- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1004 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1005
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001006- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001007 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1008 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001009
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001010- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1011 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1012 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1013 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1014 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1015
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001016- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1017 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1018 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1019 removed.
1020
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001021- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1022 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1023 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1024
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001025- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1026 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1027 to __debug__.
1028
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001029- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1030 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1031 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1032
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001033- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1034 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1035 deprecated now.
1036
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001037- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1038 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1039 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001040
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001041- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1042 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1043 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1044 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1045 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001046
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001047- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1048 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1049
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001050- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1051 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1052 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001053 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001054 is backward compatible.
1055
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001056- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1057 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1058 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1059 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1060 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1061
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001062- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1063 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1064 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1065 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1066 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1067 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001068
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001069- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1070 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1071
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001072- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1073 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1074
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001075- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1076 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1077 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1078 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1079 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1080
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001081- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1082 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1083 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1084
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001085- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001086 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1087
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001088- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1089 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1090 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001091
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001092- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1093 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1094
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001095- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1096 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1097 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1098
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001099- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1100
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001101Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001102-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001103
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001104- Added three operators to the operator module:
1105 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1106 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1107 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1108
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001109- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1110
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001111- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1112 archives.
1113
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001114- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1115 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1116 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1117
1118 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1119
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001120- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1121 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1122 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001123 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001124
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001125- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1126 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1127 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1128 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001129 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1130 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1131 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1132 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001133
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001134- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1135 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001136
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001137- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1138
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001139- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1140 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1141
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001142- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1143 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1144 supported.
1145
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001146- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1147
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001148- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1149 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001150
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001151- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1152 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1153
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001154- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1155
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001156- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1157 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1158
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001159- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1160 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1161 functions but callable type objects.
1162
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001163- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001164 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001165 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001166
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001167- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1168 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001169
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001170- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1171 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001172
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001173- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1174 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1175 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1176 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1177
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001178- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1179 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001180
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001181- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1182 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1183 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1184 and __imul__.
1185
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001186- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001187 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1188 is called.
1189
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001190- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1191 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1192 interpreter was compiled.
1193
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001194- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1195 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1196 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001197 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001198 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1199 1, not 2.
1200
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001201- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1202 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1203 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1204 limit.
1205
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001206- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1207 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1208 bug #623464.
1209
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001210- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1211 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1212 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1213 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1214
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001215Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001216-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001217
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001218- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1219
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001220- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1221 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1222 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1223 with Python 2.3a2.
1224
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001225- os.path exposes getctime.
1226
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001227- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001228 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001229 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001230 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001231 unit tests of floating point results.
1232
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001233- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1234 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1235 has been increased.
1236
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001237- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1238 executed.
1239
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001240- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1241 postinstallation script.
1242
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001243- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1244 test the current module.
1245
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001246- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001247 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1248 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1249 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1250 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1251
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001252- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001253 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001254 Ward's Optik package.
1255
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001256- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1257 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1258 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1259 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1260
1261- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1262 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001263 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001264
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001265- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1266 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1267 shelf are binary pickles.
1268
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001269- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1270 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1271
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001272- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1273 modules are iterators now.
1274
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001275- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1276 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1277 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1278 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1279 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1280 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001281
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001282- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1283 with their entity value.
1284
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001285- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1286
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001287- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1288 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001289
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001290- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1291 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001292 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001293
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001294- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1295 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1296 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1297 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1298 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1299 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1300 main():
1301
1302 import locale
1303 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1304
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001305- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1306 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1307
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001308- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1309 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1310 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1311 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1312 to the new standard.
1313
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001314- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1315 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1316 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1317 an extension to the database.
1318
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001319- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1320 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1321 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1322 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001323 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001324
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001325- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001326 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001327
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001328- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1329 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1330 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1331 bounded integers.
1332
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001333- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1334 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1335 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1336 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1337 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1338 in existence.
1339
1340 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1341 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1342 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1343 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1344 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1345 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1346
1347 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1348 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1349 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1350 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1351
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001352- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1353 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1354 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1355
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001356- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1357
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001358- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1359 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1360 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1361 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1362
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001363- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1364 argument.
1365
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001366- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1367 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1368 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1369 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1370 [SF patch 560794].
1371
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001372- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1373 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1374 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001375 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1376 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1377 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001378
1379- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1380 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001381
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001382- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1383 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1384 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1385 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001386
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001387- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1388 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1389 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1390 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1391 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1392
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001393- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001394
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001395- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1396
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001397- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1398 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1399 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1400 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1401 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1402 identical to None.
1403
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001404- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1405 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1406 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1407 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1408 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1409 results now.
1410
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001411- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1412 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1413
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001414- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1415 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1416 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1417 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1418 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1419 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1420 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1421 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1422
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001423- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1424
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001425- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1426 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1427
1428- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1429 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1430 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1431 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1432 and other systems.
1433
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001434- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1435 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1436 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1437 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 +00001438 work well with these.
1439
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001440- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1441
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001442- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001443 connections.
1444
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001445- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1446 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1447 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1448
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001449- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1450 sets
1451
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001452- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1453 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1454 name.
1455
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001456- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1457 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1458 passed in.
1459
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001460- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001461 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001462 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1463 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001464
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001465- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1466
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001467- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1468
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001469- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1470 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1471 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1472
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001473- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1474 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1475 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1476 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001477 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001478
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001479- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001480 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001481 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001482
1483- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1484 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1485 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1486
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001487- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001488 the value of its expression argument.
1489
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001490- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1491 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1492 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1493
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001494- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1495 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1496 skipstone browser was included.
1497
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001498- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1499 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1500
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001501Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001502-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001503
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001504- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1505 names in addition to accepting file names.
1506
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001507- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1508 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1509 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1510 still used and useful.)
1511
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001512- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1513 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1514 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1515 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001516
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001517- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1518 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1519 the generated binary.
1520
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001521Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001522-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001523
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001524- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1525
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001526- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1527 except in the hands of experts.
1528
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001529- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001530 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1531 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1532 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001533
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001534- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1535 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1536 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1537 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1538 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1539 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1540 builds.
1541
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001542- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1543 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1544 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1545 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1546 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1547 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1548 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1549 new type.
1550
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001551- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001552
1553 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1554 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1555 positive infinities.
1556
1557 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1558 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1559 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1560 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1561 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1562 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1563 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1564
1565 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1566
1567 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1568
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001569- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1570 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1571 size of the executable.
1572
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001573- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1574 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1575 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1576 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001577
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001578- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1579
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001580- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1581 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1582 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001583
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001584- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1585 well as Unix.
1586
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001587- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1588 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1589 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1590 modules in the README file for details.
1591
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001592C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001593-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001594
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001595- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1596 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001597 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001598 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001599 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001600
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001601- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1602 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1603 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1604 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1605 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1606 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001607 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001608 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1609 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1610 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1611 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1612 aligned.)
1613
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001614- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1615 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1616 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1617
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001618- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1619 level.
1620
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001621- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1622 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1623 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1624 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1625 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1626
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001627- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1628 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1629 code.
1630
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001631- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1632 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1633 adjusting for negative indices.
1634
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001635- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1636 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1637 object.
1638
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001639- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1640 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1641 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1642
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001643- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1644 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001645
1646- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1647
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001648- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1649 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1650 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1651 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1652
1653- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1654
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001655- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001656
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001657- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001658 without going through the buffer API.
1659
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001660- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001661
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001662- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1663 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1664 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1665 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1666
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001667- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1668 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1669
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001670- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001671 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1672
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001673New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001674-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001675
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001676- OpenVMS is now supported.
1677
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001678- AtheOS is now supported.
1679
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001680- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1681
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001682- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1683
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001684Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001685-----
1686
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001687- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1688 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1689 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001690
1691Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001692-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001693
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001694- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1695 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1696 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1697 bugs.
1698 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001699 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001700 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1701 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001702 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001703
1704- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001705 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001706
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001707- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1708 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1709
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001710- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1711 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001712 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001713 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1714
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001715- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1716 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1717 use files" uninstall option).
1718
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001719- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1720
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001721- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1722 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1723
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001724- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1725 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1726 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1727
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001728- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1729 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1730 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1731 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1732 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001733 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1734 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1735 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001736
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001737- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001738 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001739 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1740 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1741 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1742 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1743 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1744 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1745 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1746 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1747 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1748 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1749 work around.
1750
1751- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1752 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1753 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1754 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1755 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1756 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1757 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1758 specified with O_CREAT too).
1759
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001760Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001761----
1762
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001763- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001764
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001765- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1766 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1767 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1768
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001769- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1770 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1771 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1772
1773- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1774 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1775 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1776 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1777 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1778 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1779 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1780 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001781
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001782- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1783 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1784 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001785
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001786- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1787 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1788 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1789 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1790 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001791
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001792- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1793 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1794 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001795
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001796- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1797 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001798
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001799- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1800 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1801 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1802 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1803 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001804
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001805- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1806 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1807 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1808
1809- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1810 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1811 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001812
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001813- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1814 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1815 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1816 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001817 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001818
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001819- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1820 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001821
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001822- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1823 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001824
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001825- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001826 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001827 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1828 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001829
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001830
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001831What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001832===============================
1833
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001834*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1835
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001836Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001838
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001839- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1840 with a custom metaclass.
1841
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001842Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001843-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001844
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001845- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1846 are proxies.
1847
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001848Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001849-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001850
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001851- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1852 very short strings.
1853
1854- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1855 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1856 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1857 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1858 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1859
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001860Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001861-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001862
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001863- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1864 close or delete time).
1865
1866- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1867 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1868
1869- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1870
1871- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001872 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001873
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001874Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001875-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001876
1877Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001878-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001879
1880C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001881-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001882
1883New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001884-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001885
1886Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001887-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001888
1889Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001890-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001891
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001892- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1893
1894- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1895 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1896
1897- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1898 deleted at process exit time.
1899
1900- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1901 in backslash.
1902
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001903Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001904----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001905
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001906- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1907 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1908 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1909
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001910
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001911What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001912===========================
1913
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001914*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1915
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001916Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001917--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001918
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001919- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1920 been extensively updated. See
1921
1922 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1923
1924 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1925
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001926- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1927 deleted!
1928
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001929- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1930 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1931 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1932 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1933 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1934
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001935- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1936
1937 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1938 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1939
1940 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1941 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1942 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1943 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1944 supported anyway.
1945
1946 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1947 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1948
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001949- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1950 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1951 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1952 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1953 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001954
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001955- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1956 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1957 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1958
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001959Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001960-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001961
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001962- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1963 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1964 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1965 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1966 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1967 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001968 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1969 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1970 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1971 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001972
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001973- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1974 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1975 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1976
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001977Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001978-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001979
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001980- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1981
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001982Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001983-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001984
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001985- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1986 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1987 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1988 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1989 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1990 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1991
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001992- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1993
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001994- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1995
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001996- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1997
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001998- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1999 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2000 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2001
2002- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2003
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002004Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002005-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002006
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002007- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2008 off a search on Google.
2009
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002010Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002011-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002012
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002013- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2014 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2015 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2016 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2017 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2018 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2019 other platforms should do likewise.
2020
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002021- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2022 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2023 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2024
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002025C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002026-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002027
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002028- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2029 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2030 producing key-value pairs.
2031
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002032- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002033 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002034 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2035 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2036 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2037 previously went unchallenged.
2038
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002039New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002040-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002041
2042Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002043-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002044
2045Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002047
2048Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002050
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002051- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2052 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002053
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002054- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2055 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2056 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2057 home.
2058
2059
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002060What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002061===========================
2062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002063*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2064
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002065Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002066--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002067
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002068- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2069 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002070
2071 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002072 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002073
2074 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2075 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002076 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002077 This needs to be documented.
2078
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002079- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2080 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2081
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002082- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2083 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2084 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2085
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002086- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2087 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2088
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002089- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2090 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2091 class forbids it).
2092
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002093- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2094 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2095 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2096
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002097- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2098
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002099Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002100-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002101
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002102- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2103 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002104 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002105
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002106- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2107 (like 1 + '').
2108
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002109Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002110-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002111
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002112- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2113 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2114 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2115 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002116 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002117 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2118
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002119- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2120 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2121 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2122 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2123
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002124- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2125 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002126 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2127 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2128 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002129
2130- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2131 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002132
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002133- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2134 bytes on its input.
2135
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002136Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002137-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002138
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002139- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002140 convenience function.
2141
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002142- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2143 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2144 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002145 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2146 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2147 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2148 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2149 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2150 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002151
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002152- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2153 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2154 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2155 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2156
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002157- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2158 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2159 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2160
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002161- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2162 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2163 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2164 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2165
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002166- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2167 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002168 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002169 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2170 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2171 new -l and -e options.
2172
2173- statcache is now deprecated.
2174
2175- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2176 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002177 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002178 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2179 time properly taken into account.
2180
2181- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2182 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2183 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2184 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2185
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002186Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002187-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002188
2189Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002190-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002191
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002192- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2193 is built with libdb3 if available.
2194
2195- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2196
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002197C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002198-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002199
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002200- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2201 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2202 PySequence_Size().
2203
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002204- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2205
2206- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2207 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2208 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2209
2210- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2211 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2212
2213- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2214 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2215
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002216New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002217-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002218
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002219- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2220 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2221
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002222- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2223 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2224
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002225- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2226
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002227Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002228-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002229
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002230- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2231 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2232
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002233Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002234-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002235
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002236Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002237----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002238
2239- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2240 removed completely in the next release.
2241
2242- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2243 OSX.
2244
2245- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2246 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2247
2248- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2249
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002250
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002251What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002252===========================
2253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002254*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2255
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002256Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002257--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002258
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002259- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002260 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002261 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002262 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2263 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002264 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2265 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002266 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2267 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002268
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002269- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2270 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2271
2272- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2273 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2274
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002275Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002276-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002277
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002278- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2279 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2280 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2281 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2282 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2283 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2284 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2285 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2286
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002287- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2288 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2289 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2290 example).
2291
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002292- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002293 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002294 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002295 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002296
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002297- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2298 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2299 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002300 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002301
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002302- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2303 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2304 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2305 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2306 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2307 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2308
2309 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2310
2311 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2312
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002313Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002315
2316- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2317
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002318- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2319
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002320- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2321 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002322
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002323- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2324 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2325 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2326 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2327 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2328 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002329 attributes.
2330
2331- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2332 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2333 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002334
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002335- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2336 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2337 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002338
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002339- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2340 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2341 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002342 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2343 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2344
2345- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2346 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002347
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002348Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002349-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002350
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002351- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2352 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2353
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002354- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2355 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2356 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2357 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2358
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002359- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2360 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2361 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2362 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2363
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002364 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2365 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2366 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2367 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2368 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2369 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2370 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2371 without losing information).
2372
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002373- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002374 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2375 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2376 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2377 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2378 module).
2379
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002380 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002381 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2382 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2383 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2384 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002385
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002386- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002387 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2388 encoding.
2389
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002390- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2391 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2392
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002393- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002394 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2395
2396- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2397 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2398 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2399 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2400
2401- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2402
2403- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2404 ON, and OFF.
2405
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002406- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2407 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2408
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002409Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002410-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002411
2412- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2413 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2414 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002415
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002416- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2417 been added: -X and -E.
2418
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002419Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002420-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002421
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002422- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2423 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2424
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002425C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002426-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002427
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002428- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2429 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2430 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2431 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2432 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2433
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002434- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2435 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2436 as long) arguments.
2437
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002438- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2439 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2440 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2441 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2442 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2443 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2444
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002445- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2446 input.
2447
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002448New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002450
2451Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002452-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002453
2454Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002455-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002456
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002457- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2458 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2459 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2460
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002461- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2462 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2463 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002464 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002465
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002466 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2467 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2468 import signal
2469 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002470
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002471 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002472 while 1:
2473 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002474 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002475 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2476 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2477 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2478 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002479
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002480
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002481What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2482===========================
2483
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2485
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002486Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002487--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002488
2489- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2490 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2491 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2492
2493- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2494 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2495 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2496 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2497 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2498 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2499 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002500
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002501- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002502 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002503 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2504 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2505 associate a docstring with a property.
2506
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002507- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2508 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2509 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2510 other built-in object types.
2511
2512- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2513 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2514 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2515 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2516 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2517
2518- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2519 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2520
2521- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2522 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002523 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002524 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2525 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2526 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2527 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2528 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2529
2530- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2531 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2532 class.
2533
2534- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2535 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2536 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2537 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2538
2539- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2540 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2541 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2542 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2543
2544- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2545 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2546
2547- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2548 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2549 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2550 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2551 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002552 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002553 with the same value as s.
2554
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002555- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2556
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002557Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002559
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002560- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2561
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002562- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2563 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2564 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2565 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2566 objects.
2567
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002568- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2569 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002570 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2571 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2572
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002573- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2574 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2575 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2576
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002577Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002578-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002579
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002580- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2581 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2582 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2583 by the instances.
2584
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002585- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2586 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2587 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2588
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002589- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2590 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2591 before the entire comparison is complete.
2592
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002593- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2594 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2595 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2596
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002597- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2598 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2599 getwriter().
2600
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002601- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2602 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2603
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002604- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002605 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2606 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2607
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002608- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2609 iterable object.
2610
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002611- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2612 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002613
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002614- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2615 authentication.
2616
2617- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2618 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002619
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002620- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002621 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2622 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2623 a sample driver.)
2624
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002625Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002626-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002627
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002628- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2629 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2630 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2631 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2632 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2633 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2634 kernel has large file support.
2635
2636- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2637 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2638 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2639 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2640 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2641
2642- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2643 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2644 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2645
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002646C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002647-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002648
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002649- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2650 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2651
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002652New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002653-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002654
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002655- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2656 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2657
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002658Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002659-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002660
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002661- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2662 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2663 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2664 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2665 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2666
2667- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2668 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2669 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2670 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2671
2672- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2673 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2674
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002675Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002676-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002677
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002678- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002679 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2680 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002681
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002682
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002683What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2684===========================
2685
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2687
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002688Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002689----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002690
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002691- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2692 big to represent as a C double.
2693
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002694- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2695 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2696 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2697 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2698 restriction).
2699
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002700- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2701 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2702 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2703 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2704 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2705
2706 >>> dir([])
2707 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2708 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2709 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2710 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2711 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2712 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2713 'reverse', 'sort']
2714
2715 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2716
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002717- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002718 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2719 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2720 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2721 OverflowError exception.
2722
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002723- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002724 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002725 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2726 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2727 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2728 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2729 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002730 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002731 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2732 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2733
2734 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2735 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2736 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2737 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002738
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002739- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002740 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2741 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2742 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2743 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2744 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2745 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2746 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2747 once it is created.
2748
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002749- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2750 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2751 (key, value) pairs.
2752
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002753- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002754 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2755 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2756
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002757- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2758 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2759 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2760 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2761 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002762
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002763- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002764 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2765 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2766
2767 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2768
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002769- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002770 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2771
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002772Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002774
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002775- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002776 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2777 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002778
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002779- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2780 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2781 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2782 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2783 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2784 in this area anymore).
2785
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002786- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2787 threading.Timer.
2788
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002789- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2790 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2791
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002792- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002793 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2794
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002795- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002796 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2797 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2798 converted to Python longs.
2799
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002800- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002801 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2802
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002803- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2804 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2805 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2806
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002807Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002808-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002809
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002810- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2811 division operators as per PEP 238.
2812
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002813Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002814-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002815
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002816- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2817 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2818 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2819 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2820
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002821C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002822-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002823
2824- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002825
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002826- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2827 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002828 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002829
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002830 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2831 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002832 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002833 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002834
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002835- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002836 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2837 module:
2838
2839 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002840
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002841 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2842 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002843
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002844 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2845 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002846
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002847 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2848
2849 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2850
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002851- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002852 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2853 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2854 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002855
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002856New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002857-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002858
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002859- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2860 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2861 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2862 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2863 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002864
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002865Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002867
2868Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002869-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002870
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002871- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2872 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2873 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2874 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002875 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2876 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2877 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2878 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2879 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002881- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002882 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2883
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002884
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002885What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2886===========================
2887
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002888*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2889
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002890Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002891-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002892
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002893- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2894 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2895
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002896- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2897 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2898 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002899
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002900- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2901 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2902 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2903 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002904
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002905- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2906
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002907- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002908
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002909Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002910-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002911
2912- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002913 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002914 the module docstring for details.
2915
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002916Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002918
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002919- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002920 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2921 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2922 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002923
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002924- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2925 Nick Mathewson.
2926
2927Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002929
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002930- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2931 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2932 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2933 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2934 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2935 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2936 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2937 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2938
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002939- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2940 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2941 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2942 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2943
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002944- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2945 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2946 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2947 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2948 come a long way).
2949
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002950- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2951 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2952 write filters for these warnings).
2953
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002954- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2955 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2956 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2957 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2958 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2959
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002960- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2961 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2962 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2963 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2964 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2965 older distribution.
2966
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002967Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002968-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002969
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002970- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2971 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002972 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002973
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002974- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2975 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2976 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2977
2978- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2979
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002980- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2981
2982- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2983
2984- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2985
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002986- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002987
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002988- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2989
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002990New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002991-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002992
2993C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002994-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002995
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002996- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2997 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2998 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2999 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3000 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3001 against buffer overruns.
3002
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003003- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003004 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3005 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003006 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3007 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3008 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3009
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003010- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3011 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3012 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3013 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3014 deprecated.
3015
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003016Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003018
3019- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3020 relevant is found.
3021
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003022
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003023What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003024===========================
3025
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3027
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003028Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003030
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003031- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3032 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3033 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3034 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3035 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3036 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3037 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3038 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003039 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003040 repaired.
3041
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003042- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003043 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003044 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3045 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3046 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3047 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3048 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3049 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3050 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3051 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3052
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003053- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3054 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3055 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3056 leading BMO character).
3057
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003058- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3059 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3060 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3061
3062 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3063 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3064 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003065
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003066 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3067 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3068 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3069 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3070 for various simple to use conversions.
3071
3072 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3073 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3074
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003075 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3076 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3077 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3078 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3079 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3080 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3081 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3082 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3083 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3084 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3085 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3086 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3087 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3088 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3089 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003090
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003091- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3092 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3093 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003094 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003095 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003096
3097 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003098 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3099 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3100 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3101 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3102 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003103 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3104 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003105
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003106 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3107 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3108 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003109 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003110
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003111- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3112 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3113 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3114 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3115 floating arithmetic,
3116
3117 x = 9007199254740992.0
3118 print long(x)
3119
3120 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3121 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3122 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3123 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3124 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3125 functions are of good quality).
3126
3127 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3128 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3129 algorithms to break.
3130
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003131- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3132 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3133 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3134 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3135 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3136 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3137 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3138 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3139 order.
3140
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003141- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3142 operation along the most common code paths.
3143
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003144- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3145 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3146
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003147- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3148 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3149 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3150 {}.update(UserDict())
3151
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003152- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3153 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3154 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3155 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3156 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3157 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3158 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3159 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3160
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003161- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003162 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003164 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003165 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3166 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003167 join() method of strings
3168 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003169 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3170 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003171 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003172 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003173
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003174- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3175 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3176
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003177- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3178 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3179
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003180- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3181 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3182 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3183 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3184
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003185- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3186 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003187 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003188 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3189 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003190
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003191- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3192
3193
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003194Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003196
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003197- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003198 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003199 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3200 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3201
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003202- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3203 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3204
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003205- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3206 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3207 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3208 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3209
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003210- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3211 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3212 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3213
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003214- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3215
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003216- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3217
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003218- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3219 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3220 that are still imported into string.py).
3221
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003222- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3223
3224- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3225 Now it does.
3226
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003227- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3228
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003229- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3230 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3231 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3232 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3233 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003234 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3235 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003236
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003237- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3238 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3239 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3240 'help(object)'.
3241
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003242Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003243-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003244
3245- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003246 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003247 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3248 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3249
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003250- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003251 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3252 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003253
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003254C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003256
3257- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3258 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003259
3260----
3261
3262**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**