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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000015- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
16 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
17 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
18 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
19 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
20 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
21 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
22 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +000023 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
24 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
25 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
26 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
27 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +000028
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000029- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
30 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
31 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
32 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
33 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
34
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000035- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
36
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000037- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
38 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
39
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000040- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
41 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
42 modified the list.
43
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000044- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
45 functions is now writable.
46
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000047- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
48 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
49 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
50 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
51
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000052- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
53 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
54 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
55 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
56 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000057
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000058- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
59 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
60
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000061Extension modules
62-----------------
63
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000064- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
65
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +000066- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
67 data.
68
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000069- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
70 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
71 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
72 supposed to have been truncated away.
73
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000074- Added socket.socketpair().
75
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +000076- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
77 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
78
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000079Library
80-------
81
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +000082- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
83 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
84
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +000085- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
86 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
87
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +000088- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
89 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
90
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +000091- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
92
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +000093- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
94 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +000095
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000096- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
97 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
98
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000099- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
100
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000101- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
102
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000103- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
104
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000105- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
106 Percivall.
107
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000108- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
109 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
110
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000111- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
112 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
113 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000114 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000115
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000116- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
117 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
118 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
119 and exponent.
120
121- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
122
123- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
124 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
125 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
126
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000127- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
128 to the readline module.
129
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000130- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000131 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
132 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000133
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000134- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
135 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
136 contains symlinks.
137
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000138- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
139 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
140
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000141- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
142 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
143 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
144
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000145- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
146 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
147 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
148 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
149 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
150 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
151 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
152 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
153 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
154 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
155 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
156 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
157 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
158
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000159- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
160
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000161Tools/Demos
162-----------
163
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000164- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
165 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
166
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000167- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
168
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000169Build
170-----
171
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000172- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
173 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
174 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
175 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
176 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
177 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
178 plans to do so.
179
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000180- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
181 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
182
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000183- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
184 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
185
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000186- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
187 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
188
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000189- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
190 GNU/k*BSD systems.
191
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000192- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
193 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
194
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000195C API
196-----
197
198Documentation
199-------------
200
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000201- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
202 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
203
204- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
205 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
206 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000207
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000208New platforms
209-------------
210
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000211- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
212
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000213Tests
214-----
215
216Windows
217-------
218
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000219- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
220 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
221 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
222 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
223 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
224 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
225 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
226 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
227 the problem.
228
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000229Mac
230---
231
232
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000233What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
234=================================
235
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000236*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000237
238Core and builtins
239-----------------
240
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000241- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
242 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
243 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
244 sensitive code.
245
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000246- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
247 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
248 @staticmethod
249 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000250 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000251
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000252- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
253 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
254 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
255 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
256 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
257 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
258 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
259 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
260 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
261 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
262 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
263
264 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
265 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
266 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
267 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
268 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
269 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
270 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
271
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000272- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
273 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
274
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000275- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000276 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000277
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000278- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000279 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000280 which was missing for no apparent reason.
281
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000282- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000283 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
284 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
285
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000286- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
287 types that support garbage collection.
288
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000289- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
290
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000291- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
292 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
293 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
294 Jython.
295
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000296- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
297
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000298- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
299 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
300
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000301- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
302 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
303 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000304
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000305- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
306 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
307 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
308
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000309Extension modules
310-----------------
311
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000312- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
313
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000314Library
315-------
316
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000317- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
318 TIS-620
319
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000320- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
321 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
322 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
323 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
324 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
325 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
326 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
327 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
328 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
329 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
330
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000331- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
332
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000333- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
334 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
335 same as when the argument is omitted).
336 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
337
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000338- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
339
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000340- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
341 schemes are offered.
342
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000343- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
344
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000345- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
346 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
347 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
348
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000349- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
350
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000351- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
352 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
353
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000354- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
355 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
356 when dummy_threading is being used.
357
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000358- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
359 from a tarfile.
360
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000361- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000362 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000363
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000364- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
365 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
366 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
367 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
368
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000369- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
370 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
371
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000372- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
373 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
374 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
375 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
376 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
377 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
378 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
379 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
380 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
381 by some other method in progress).
382
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000383- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
384 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
385 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000386
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000387- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
388
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000389- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
390 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
391 AM Kuchling.
392
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000393- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
394 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
395 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
396
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000397- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
398 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
399 instead of unsigned.
400
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000401- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000402 no longer part of the public API.
403
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000404- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
405 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
406 string methods of the same name).
407
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000408- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000409 SF patch 945642.
410
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000411- doctest unittest integration improvements:
412
413 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
414
415 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
416 DocTestSuites.
417
418- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
419 that provide thread-local data.
420
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000421- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
422 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
423
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000424- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
425
426- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
427 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
428 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
429
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000430- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
431
432 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
433 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
434 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000435
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000436 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
437 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
438 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
439 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
440
441 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
442 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
443
444 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
445 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
446 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
447 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
448
449 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
450 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
451 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
452 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
453 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
454
455 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
456 wrapping help output.
457
458 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
459 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
460 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000461
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000462C API
463-----
464
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000465- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
466 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
467 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
468 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
469 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
470 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
471 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
472 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
473 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
474 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
475 its visible semantics have not changed.
476
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000477- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
478 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
479
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000480Documentation
481-------------
482
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000483- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000484
485 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000486 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000487
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000488 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000489
490 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
491
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000492- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000493
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000494Tests
495-----
496
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000497- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000498 platforms that use the Makefile.
499
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000500- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
501 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
502 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
503
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000504
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000505What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
506=================================
507
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000508*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000509
510Core and builtins
511-----------------
512
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000513- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
514 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
515 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
516 objects now (one object instead of three).
517
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000518- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
519 Windows DLLs.
520
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000521- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
522 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000523
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000524- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
525 a new .pyc magic.
526
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000527- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
528 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
529 be there.
530
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000531- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
532 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
533 the LC_NUMERIC category.
534
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000535- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
536 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
537 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
538
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000539- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
540
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000541- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
542 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
543 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000544
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000545- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
546 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
547
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000548- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
549
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000550- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000551 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000552
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000553- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
554
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000555- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
556
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000557- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
558 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
559
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000560- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
561 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
562 Fixes bug #858016 .
563
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000564- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
565 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
566 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
567
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000568- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
569 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
570 improves their performance (about 35%).
571
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000572- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
573 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
574 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
575
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000576- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
577 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
578 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
579 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
580
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000581- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
582 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
583 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
584 length is not known).
585
586- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
587 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000588 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
589 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000590 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
591
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000592- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
593 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
594
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000595- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
596 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
597 keyword arguments.
598
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000599- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
600 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
601 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
602
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000603- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
604 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
605 cases.
606
607- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
608 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
609 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
610 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
611 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
612 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
613 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
614 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
615 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
616 a release build.
617
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000618- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
619 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
620
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000621- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000622 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000623
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000624- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
625 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
626 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
627 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
628 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
629 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
630 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
631 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
632 destroyed.
633
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000634- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
635 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
636 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
637 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
638 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
639 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
640 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
641 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
642
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000643- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
644 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
645 character other than a space.
646
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000647- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
648 by the function object or by the method object, the function
649 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
650 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
651 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
652 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
653 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
654 attributes with the same name.
655
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000656- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
657 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
658 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
659 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
660 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
661 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
662 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
663 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
664 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
665 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
666 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
667 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
668 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
669 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000670
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000671- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
672 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
673 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
674 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
675 This has been repaired.
676
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000677- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
678
679- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
680
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000681- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
682 over a sequence.
683
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000684- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000685 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000686
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000687- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
688
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000689- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
690 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
691 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
692 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
693 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
694 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
695 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
696 records with equal keys is unchanged).
697
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000698- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
699 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
700 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
701
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000702- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
703 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
704 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
705 freelist.
706
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000707- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
708 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
709
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000710- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
711 number.
712
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000713- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
714 a TypeError exception.
715
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000716- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
717 820195.
718
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000719- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
720 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
721 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
722
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000723- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000724 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
725 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000726
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000727- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
728 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
729 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
730
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000731- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
732 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000733 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000734
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000735- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000736 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
737 the first call.
738
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000739
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000740Extension modules
741-----------------
742
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000743- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
744 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
745
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000746- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
747 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
748 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
749 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
750 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
751 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
752 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000753
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000754- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
755
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000756- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
757
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000758- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
759 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
760
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000761- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
762 fewer false positives.
763
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000764- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
765 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
766
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000767- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000768 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
769
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000770- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000771 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000772 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000773 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
774 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000775
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000776- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
777 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
778 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
779 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
780
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000781- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
782 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
783 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
784 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
785 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
786 #897625.
787
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000788- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
789 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
790
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000791- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
792 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
793 and pops on either side of the deque.
794
795- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
796 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
797
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000798- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
799 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
800 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
801 other functions that expect a function argument.
802
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000803- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
804
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000805- os.getsid was added.
806
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000807- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
808 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
809 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
810
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000811- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
812
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000813- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
814
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000815- readline.clear_history was added.
816
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000817- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
818
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000819- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
820
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000821- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
822
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000823- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
824
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000825- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
826
827- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
828
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000829- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
830
831- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
832
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000833- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
834 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
835 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
836
837- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
838 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
839 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
840 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
841 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
842 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
843 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
844
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000845- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
846 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
847 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
848 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000849
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000850- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000851 iterators from a single iterable.
852
853- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
854 of raising a TypeError exception.
855
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000856- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
857 as parameter.
858
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000859Library
860-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000861
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000862- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
863 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
864 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000865
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000866- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
867 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
868 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000869
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000870- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000871
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000872- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
873 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000874
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000875- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
876 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
877
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000878- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
879
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000880- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000881 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000882
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000883- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
884 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
885
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000886- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
887
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000888- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
889 on cygwin and mingw32.
890
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000891- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
892
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000893- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
894 module.
895
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000896- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
897 installation scheme for all platforms.
898
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000899- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000900 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000901
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000902- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
903 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
904 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
905
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000906- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
907 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
908 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
909
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000910- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
911
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000912- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
913
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000914- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
915 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
916
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000917- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
918 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
919 type pattern with the same value exists.
920
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000921- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
922 when run from the command prompt).
923
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000924- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
925 not taken into consideration when caching value.
926
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000927- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
928 default sort).
929
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000930- Added global runctx function to profile module
931
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000932- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
933
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000934- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
935
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000936- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
937
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000938- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000939 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
940 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
941 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
942 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
943 accordingly.
944
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000945- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
946 decoding standards.
947
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000948- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
949 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
950 called for all requests.
951
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000952- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
953 they are passed to the compiler.
954
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000955- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
956 indent, width and depth.
957
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000958- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
959 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
960
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000961- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
962 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
963
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000964- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
965
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000966- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
967
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000968- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
969
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000970- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
971 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
972
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000973- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000974 for better performance.
975
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000976- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000977
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000978- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
979 a string).
980
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000981- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
982
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000983- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
984
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000985- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
986
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000987- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
988
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000989- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
990 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
991 list of fieldnames.
992
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000993- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
994 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
995
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000996- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
997
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000998- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
999 empty lists.
1000
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001001- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1002 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1003 and shelves.
1004
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001005- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1006 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1007
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001008- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001009 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1010 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001011
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001012- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1013 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001014 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001015
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001016- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001017 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1018 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1019
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001020- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1021 and removed in Py2.4.
1022
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001023- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1024
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001025- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1026
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001027Tools/Demos
1028-----------
1029
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001030- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1031 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1032
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001033- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1034
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001035- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1036 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1037 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1038 destination in situations where both files are given.
1039
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001040- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1041 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1042 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1043 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1044
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001045- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1046
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001047- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1048 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1049 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1050 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1051 now.
1052
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001053- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1054 in effect
1055
1056- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1057 C-c C-h
1058
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001059- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1060 -d option was given.
1061
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001062Build
1063-----
1064
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001065- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1066 build under OS X.
1067
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001068- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1069 --enable-profiling.
1070
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001071- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1072 is configured --with-tsc.
1073
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001074- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1075 on AMD64.
1076
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001077- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1078 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1079
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001080- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1081 removed.
1082
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001083- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1084 supported (see PEP 11).
1085
1086- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1087
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001088- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1089
1090- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1091 (see PEP 11).
1092
1093- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1094 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1095
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001096C API
1097-----
1098
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001099- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1100 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1101 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1102
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001103- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1104 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1105 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1106 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1107
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001108- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1109 generator objects.
1110
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001111- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1112 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001113 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1114 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001115
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001116- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1117 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1118
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001119- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1120 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1121 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1122 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1123 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1124
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001125- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1126 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1127 about 10% faster.
1128
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001129- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1130 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1131
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001132- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1133 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1134 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1135 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1136
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001137Windows
1138-------
1139
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001140- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1141 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1142 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1143 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1144
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001145- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1146 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1147 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1148
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001149
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001150What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1151===============================
1152
1153*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1154
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001155IDLE
1156----
1157
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001158- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1159 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1160 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1161 context-menu actions.
1162
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001163- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1164 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1165 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1166 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1167 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1168 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1169 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1170 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1171 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1172
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001173
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001174What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1175=============================================
1176
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001177*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001178
1179Core and builtins
1180-----------------
1181
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001182- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001183 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001184 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1185
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001186Extension modules
1187-----------------
1188
1189- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1190 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1191 than once. This has been fixed.
1192
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001193- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1194 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1195 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1196 call.
1197
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001198- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1199
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001200Library
1201-------
1202
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001203- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1204 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1205
1206- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1207 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1208 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1209 restored.
1210
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001211IDLE
1212----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001213
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001214- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001215
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001216Build
1217-----
1218
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001219- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1220 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1221
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001222C API
1223-----
1224
1225Windows
1226-------
1227
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001228- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1229 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1230
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001231- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1232
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001233Mac
1234---
1235
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001236- Various fixes to pimp.
1237
1238- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1239
1240- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1241 more problems than it solves.
1242
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001243
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001244What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1245=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001246
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001247*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1248
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001249Core and builtins
1250-----------------
1251
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001252- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1253 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1254
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001255- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1256 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001257 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001258
1259- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1260 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1261 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001262 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001263
1264- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1265 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001266
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001267- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1268 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1269 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1270
1271- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001272 770247.
1273
1274- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001275
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001276Extension modules
1277-----------------
1278
1279- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1280 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1281
1282- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1283
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001284- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1285
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001286- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1287 contained within the _strptime module.
1288
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001289- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1290 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1291
1292- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001293 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1294
1295- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1296 the find_class attribute, if present.
1297
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001298- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001299
1300 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1301 (SF bug 763298).
1302
1303 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001304 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1305 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1306 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001307
1308 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1309
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001310Library
1311-------
1312
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001313- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1314
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001315- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1316 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1317 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1318 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1319 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1320 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1321 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1322 or Tester().
1323
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001324- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1325 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1326 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1327 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1328 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1329 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1330 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1331 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1332 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001333
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001334 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001335
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001336- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1337 weren't before was an oversight.
1338
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001339- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1340 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1341
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001342- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1343 when there are no lines.
1344
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001345- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1346 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1347
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001348- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1349 to child processes.
1350
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001351- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1352
1353- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1354
1355- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1356 xmlrpclib.
1357
1358- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1359 responses.
1360
1361- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1362 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1363
1364- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1365 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1366 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1367
1368- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1369 used as patterns.
1370
1371- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1372 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1373 than Tk 8.3.
1374
1375- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1376
1377- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001378
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001379Tools/Demos
1380-----------
1381
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001382- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1383
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001384- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1385
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001386- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001387
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001388Build
1389-----
1390
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001391- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1392
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001393- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1394
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001395- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1396 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001397
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001398- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1399 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1400 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001401
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001402C API
1403-----
1404
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001405- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1406 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1407
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001408Windows
1409-------
1410
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001411- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1412 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1413 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1414 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1415 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1416 Python exception ::
1417
1418 thread.error: can't start new thread
1419
1420 is raised now.
1421
1422- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1423 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1424 instead of from DLL teardown.
1425
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001426Mac
1427---
1428
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001429- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001430 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001431 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1432 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1433 the executable in the bundle.
1434
1435- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001436
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001437- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1438
1439- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1440 on Panther.
1441
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001442What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1443================================
1444
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001445*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001446
1447Core and builtins
1448-----------------
1449
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001450- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1451 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1452 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1453 with the -i option.
1454
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001455- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1456 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1457
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001458- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1459 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1460
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001461- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1462 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1463 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1464 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1465 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1466 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1467 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1468 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1469 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1470 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1471 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1472 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1473 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001474
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001475- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1476 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1477 embedded in a lambda expression.
1478
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001479- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1480 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1481 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1482 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1483 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1484
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001485- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1486 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1487 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1488
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001489- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1490 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1491
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001492- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1493 It's writable again.
1494
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001495- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1496 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1497 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001498 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001499
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001500- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1501 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1502 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1503
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001504Extension modules
1505-----------------
1506
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001507- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1508 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1509
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001510- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1511 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1512 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1513 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1514
1515- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1516 collection.
1517
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001518- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1519 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1520 unique within a single program run.
1521
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001522- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1523 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1524
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001525- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1526 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1527
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001528- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1529 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001530
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001531- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1532
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001533- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1534 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1535
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001536- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1537 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1538 for many BSD-derived systems.
1539
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001540
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001541Library
1542-------
1543
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001544- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1545 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1546 primary ones:
1547
1548 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1549 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1550 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1551
1552 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1553 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1554 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1555 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1556 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1557 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1558
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001559- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1560 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1561 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1562 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1563 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1564 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1565 argument.
1566
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001567- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1568 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1569 in the archive.
1570
1571- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1572 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1573
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001574- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1575 569574).
1576
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001577- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1578 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1579 no more.
1580
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001581- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1582 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1583 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1584 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1585 code coverage.
1586
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001587- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1588 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1589 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001590 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1591 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001592
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001593- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1594 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1595 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001596 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001597
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001598- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1599
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001600- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1601 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1602 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1603 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1604
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001605- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1606 handling.
1607
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001608- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1609 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1610
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001611- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1612 in socket.py.
1613
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001614- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1615
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001616- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1617 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1618 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1619 opener with proxy support.
1620
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001621- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1622
1623- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1624
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001625Tools/Demos
1626-----------
1627
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001628- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1629
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001630- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1631
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001632- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1633 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001634
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001635- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1636 files.
1637
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001638Build
1639-----
1640
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001641- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001642 different root directory.
1643
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001644C API
1645-----
1646
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001647- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1648 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1649 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1650 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1651 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1652 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1653 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1654 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1655 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1656 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1657
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001658- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1659 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1660 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1661 from Python.
1662
1663
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001664New platforms
1665-------------
1666
1667None this time.
1668
1669Tests
1670-----
1671
1672- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1673 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1674
1675Windows
1676-------
1677
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001678- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1679
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001680- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1681 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1682 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1683 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1684 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1685 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1686 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1687 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1688 that's what it's for.
1689
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001690Mac
1691---
1692
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001693- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1694 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1695 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1696 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001697- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1698 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1699- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001700
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001701SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1702------------------------------------
1703
1704430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1705598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1706622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1707661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1708683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1709697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1710713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1711724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1712727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1713729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1714730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1715731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1716732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1717733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1718735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1719740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1720744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1721745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1722747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1723749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1724751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1725753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1726755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1727757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1728760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1729
1730
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001731What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1732================================
1733
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001734*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001735
1736Core and builtins
1737-----------------
1738
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001739- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1740 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1741
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001742- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1743 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1744 and cannot be strings).
1745
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001746- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1747 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1748 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1749 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1750
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001751- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1752 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1753 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1754 Python itself.
1755
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001756- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1757 the referenced object, if it has one.
1758
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001759- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1760 the thread started at
1761 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1762
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001763- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1764 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1765 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1766 placed on a list index.
1767
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001768- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1769 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1770 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1771 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1772
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001773- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1774 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1775 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1776 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1777 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1778 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1779 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1780
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001781- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1782 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1783 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1784 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1785 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1786
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001787- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1788 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001789
1790- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1791 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1792 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1793 #693195.)
1794
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001795- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1796 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001797
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001798- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001799 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001800 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1801 interpreter executions, would fail.
1802
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001803- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001804 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001805 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001806
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001807Extension modules
1808-----------------
1809
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001810- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1811 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1812 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1813 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1814
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001815- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1816 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1817
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001818- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1819 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1820 and Greg Chapman.)
1821
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001822- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1823 recursively.
1824
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001825- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001826 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1827 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1828 leaks.
1829
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001830- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1831
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001832- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1833 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1834 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1835 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1836 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1837 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1838 #705836.
1839
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001840- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001841 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1842
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001843- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1844 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1845 See SF bug #692416.
1846
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001847- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1848 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1849
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001850- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1851 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1852 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001853
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001854- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001855 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1856 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1857
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001858- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1859 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1860 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1861 timeouts to work properly.
1862
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001863Library
1864-------
1865
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001866- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1867 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1868 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1869 future release.
1870
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001871- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1872 for querying platform dependent features.
1873
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001874- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001875
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001876- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1877 pickle protocol versions.
1878
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001879- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1880 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1881 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1882
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001883- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1884
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001885- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1886 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1887 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1888 modules.
1889
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001890- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1891 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1892 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1893
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001894- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1895 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1896
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001897- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1898 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1899 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1900
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001901- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001902 MS Office extensions.
1903
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001904- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1905 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1906
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001907- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1908 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1909
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001910- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1911 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1912 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1913 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1914 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1915 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1916
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001917- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1918 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1919 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001920
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001921- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1922 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1923 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1924
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001925- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1926
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001927- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1928 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1929 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1930
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001931Tools/Demos
1932-----------
1933
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001934- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1935 See the module docstring for details.
1936
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001937Build
1938-----
1939
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001940- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1941 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001942
1943C API
1944-----
1945
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001946- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1947
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001948- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1949 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1950 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1951
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001952- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1953 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001954
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001955 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1956 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1957 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001958
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001959- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001960 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1961
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001962- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1963 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1964 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001965
1966New platforms
1967-------------
1968
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001969None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001970
1971Tests
1972-----
1973
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001974- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1975 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001976
1977Windows
1978-------
1979
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001980- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1981 function.
1982
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001983- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1984 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001985
1986Mac
1987---
1988
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001989- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1990 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001991
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001992- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1993 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001994
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001995- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1996 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1997 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001998
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001999- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002000 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2001 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002002
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002003- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2004 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002005
2006
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2008=================================
2009
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002010*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002011
2012Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002013-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002014
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002015- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2016 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2017 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2018
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002019- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2020 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2021 (SF patch #664376.)
2022
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002023- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2024 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2025 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2026 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2027 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2028 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002029 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002030
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002031- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2032 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2033 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2034 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002035 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002036
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002037- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2038 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2039 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2040 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2041 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2042 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2043 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2044 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2045 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2046 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2047 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2048
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002049- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2050 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2051 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2052 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2053 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2054 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2055
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002056- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2057 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2058
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002059- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2060 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2061 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2062 case.)
2063
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002064- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2065 passed as unicode strings.
2066
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002067- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2068 See SF bug #683467.
2069
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002070- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2071 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2072
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002073- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2074
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002075- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2076
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002077- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2078 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2079 arguments.
2080
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002081- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2082 See SF bug #667147.
2083
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002084- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002085 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002086 See SF bug #676155.
2087
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002088- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002089 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002090 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2091 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2092 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2093 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2094 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2095 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002096
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002097Extension modules
2098-----------------
2099
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002100- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2101 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2102 tp_as_number pointer.
2103
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002104- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2105 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2106 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2107 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2108 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2109
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002110- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2111
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002112- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2113
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002114- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002115 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002116 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2117 patch #678531.)
2118
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002119- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2120 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2121
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002122- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2123 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2124
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002125- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2126
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002127- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2128 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2129 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2130
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002131- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2132
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002133- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2134 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2135
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002136- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002137
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002138- datetime changes:
2139
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002140 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2141
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002142 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2143 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2144 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2145 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2146 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2147 now.
2148
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002149 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002150 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2151 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002152
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002153 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002154 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002155 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2156 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2157 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2158 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002159
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002160 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2161 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2162 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002163 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2164
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002165 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2166 by a later example coded by Guido.
2167
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002168 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002169 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2170 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2171 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002172 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2173 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2174
2175 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2176 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2177 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2178 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2179 tzinfo subclass instance.
2180
2181 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2182 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2183 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2184 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2185 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2186 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2187 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2188 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002189
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002190 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2191 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2192 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2193 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2194 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002195 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2196
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002197 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002198
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002199 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2200 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2201 as a naive datetime object.
2202
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002203 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2204 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2205 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2206
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002207 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2208 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2209 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2210 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2211 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2212 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2213 comparison.
2214
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002215 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2216 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2217 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2218 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002219 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002220
2221 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002222
2223 and ::
2224
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002225 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2226
2227 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2228 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2229 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2230 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2231
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002232 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2233 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2234 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2235 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2236 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2237
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002238 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2239 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002240 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2241 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002242
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002243Library
2244-------
2245
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002246- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2247 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2248
2249- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2250 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2251 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2252 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2253 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2254 See PEP 307 for details.
2255
2256- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2257 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2258
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002259- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2260 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002261 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002262 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2263 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002264 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002265
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002266- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2267 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2268
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002269- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2270 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2271 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2272
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002273- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2274
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002275- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2276 exception.
2277
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002278- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2279 class.
2280
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002281- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2282 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2283 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2284
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002285- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2286 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2287
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002288- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002289 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2290 See SF bug #659228.
2291
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002292- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2293 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2294 See SF patch #651082.
2295
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002296- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002297
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002298- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2299 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2300
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002301- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002302 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002303
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002304- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2305 DOS paths from other platforms.
2306
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002307Tools/Demos
2308-----------
2309
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002310- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2311 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2312 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2313 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2314 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2315 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2316 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2317 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2318 example:
2319
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002320 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2321 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002322
2323 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2324
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002325
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002326Build
2327-----
2328
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002329- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2330 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2331 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002332 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2333
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002334 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2335
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002336- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2337 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2338 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2339 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2340 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2341 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2342 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2343 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2344 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2345
2346- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2347 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2348 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2349 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2350
2351- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2352 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2353
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002354C API
2355-----
2356
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002357- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2358 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002359
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002360- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2361 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2362 tp_as_number pointer.
2363
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002364- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2365 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2366 (SF #681367)
2367
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002368- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2369 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2370 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2371 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002372
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002373Tests
2374-----
2375
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002376- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002377 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2378 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2379 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2380 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2381 pydoc.)
2382
2383- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2384
2385- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002386
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002387Windows
2388-------
2389
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002390- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2391 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2392 time).
2393
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002394- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2395 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2396
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002397- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2398 release without strong cryptography.
2399
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002400- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002401 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002402
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002403- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2404 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2405
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002406Mac
2407---
2408
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002409- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2410 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002411
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002412- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2413 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2414 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002415
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002416- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2417 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002418
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002419- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2420 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2421 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2422 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002423
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002424- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002425 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2426 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2427 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002428
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002430What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002431=================================
2432
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002433*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002434
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002435Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002436--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002437
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002438- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2439
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002440- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2441 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002442 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002443 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002444 a different meaning than before.
2445
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002446- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002447 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002448 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002449
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002450- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002451 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002452 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002453
2454- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2455 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2456 and deallocation.
2457
2458- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2459 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2460
2461- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2462 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2463 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2464 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2465 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2466
2467- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2468 now detected by the garbage collector.
2469
2470- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2471 [SF bug 519621]
2472
2473- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2474 identifier.
2475
2476- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2477 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2478 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2479 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2480 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2481 [SF bug 563060]
2482
2483- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2484 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2485 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2486 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2487 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2488
2489- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2490 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2491 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2492
2493- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2494
2495- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2496 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2497 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2498 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2499 state of the slots would be lost.)
2500
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002501Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002502-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002503
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002504- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002505 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2506 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2507 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2508 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002509 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2510 Jython 2.1.
2511
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002512- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002513 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002514 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2515 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2516 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2517 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2518 these, see PEP 302.
2519
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002520- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2521 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2522 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2523
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002524- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2525 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2526 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2527
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002528- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2529 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2530 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2531
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002532- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2533 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2534 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2535 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2536 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2537 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2538 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2539 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2540 releases or implementations.
2541
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002542- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002543 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2544 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002545
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002546- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2547 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2548
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002549- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2550 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2551 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2552
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002553- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2554 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2555
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002556- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2557 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002558 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2559 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002560
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002561- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2562 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2563 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2564 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2565 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2566
2567 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2568 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2569 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2570 pattern.
2571
2572 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2573 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2574 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2575 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2576
2577 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2578 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2579 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2580 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2581 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2582 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2583
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002584- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2585 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2586 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2587 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2588 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2589 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2590 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2591 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002592
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002593- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2594 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2595 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2596 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2597 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002598 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2599 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2600 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2601 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2602 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2603 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2604 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002605
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002606- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2607 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2608
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002609- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2610 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2611 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2612 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2613 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2614 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2615 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2616 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2617 to Zack Weinberg!
2618
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002619- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2620 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2621 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2622 type. This has been fixed now.
2623
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002624- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2625 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2626 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2627
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002628- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2629 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2630 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2631 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2632 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2633 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2634 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2635 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002636 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002637
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002638- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2639 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2640 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002641
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002642- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2643 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2644 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2645 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2646 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2647 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2648 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2649 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002650 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002651 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2652 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2653
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002654- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2655 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2656 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2657 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2658 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2659 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2660 this.)
2661
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002662- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2663 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002664 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002665 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002666 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2667 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002668 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2669 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002670
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002671- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2672 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2673 currently running.
2674
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002675- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2676 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2677 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2678 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2679
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002680- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2681 as directory names.
2682
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002683- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2684 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2685
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002686- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2687 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2688
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002689- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002690 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2691 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002692
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002693- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2694 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2695 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2696 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2697 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2698
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002699- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2700 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2701 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2702 removed.
2703
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002704- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2705 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2706 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2707
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002708- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2709 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2710 to __debug__.
2711
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002712- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2713 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2714 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2715
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002716- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2717 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2718 deprecated now.
2719
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002720- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2721 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2722 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002723
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002724- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2725 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2726 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2727 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2728 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002729
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002730- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2731 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2732
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002733- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2734 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2735 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002736 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002737 is backward compatible.
2738
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002739- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2740 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2741 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2742 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2743 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2744
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002745- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2746 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2747 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2748 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2749 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2750 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002751
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002752- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2753 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2754
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002755- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2756 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2757
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002758- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2759 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2760 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2761 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2762 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2763
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002764- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2765 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2766 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2767
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002768- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002769 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2770
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002771- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2772 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2773 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002774
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002775- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2776 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2777
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002778- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2779 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2780 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2781
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002782- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002784Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002786
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002787- Added three operators to the operator module:
2788 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2789 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2790 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2791
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002792- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2793
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002794- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2795 archives.
2796
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002797- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2798 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2799 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2800
2801 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2802
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002803- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2804 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2805 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002806 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002807
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002808- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2809 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2810 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2811 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002812 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2813 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2814 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2815 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002816
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002817- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2818 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002819
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002820- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2821
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002822- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2823 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2824
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002825- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2826 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2827 supported.
2828
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002829- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2830
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002831- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2832 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002833
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002834- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2835 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2836
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002837- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2838
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002839- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2840 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2841
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002842- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2843 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2844 functions but callable type objects.
2845
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002846- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002847 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002848 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002849
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002850- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2851 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002852
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002853- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2854 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002855
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002856- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2857 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2858 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2859 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2860
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002861- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2862 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002863
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002864- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2865 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2866 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2867 and __imul__.
2868
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002869- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002870 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2871 is called.
2872
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002873- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2874 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2875 interpreter was compiled.
2876
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002877- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2878 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2879 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002880 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002881 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2882 1, not 2.
2883
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002884- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2885 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2886 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2887 limit.
2888
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002889- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2890 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2891 bug #623464.
2892
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002893- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2894 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2895 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2896 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2897
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002898Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002899-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002900
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002901- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2902
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002903- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2904 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2905 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2906 with Python 2.3a2.
2907
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002908- os.path exposes getctime.
2909
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002910- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002911 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002912 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002913 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002914 unit tests of floating point results.
2915
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002916- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2917 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2918 has been increased.
2919
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002920- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2921 executed.
2922
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002923- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2924 postinstallation script.
2925
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002926- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2927 test the current module.
2928
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002929- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002930 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2931 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2932 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2933 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2934
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002935- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002936 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002937 Ward's Optik package.
2938
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002939- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2940 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2941 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2942 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2943
2944- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2945 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002946 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002947
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002948- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2949 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2950 shelf are binary pickles.
2951
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002952- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2953 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2954
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002955- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2956 modules are iterators now.
2957
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002958- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2959 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2960 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2961 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2962 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2963 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002964
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002965- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2966 with their entity value.
2967
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002968- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2969
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002970- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2971 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002972
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002973- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2974 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002975 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002976
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002977- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2978 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2979 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2980 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2981 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2982 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2983 main():
2984
2985 import locale
2986 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2987
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002988- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2989 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2990
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002991- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2992 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2993 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2994 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2995 to the new standard.
2996
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002997- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2998 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2999 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3000 an extension to the database.
3001
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003002- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3003 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3004 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3005 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003006 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003007
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003008- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003009 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003010
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003011- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3012 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3013 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3014 bounded integers.
3015
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003016- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3017 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3018 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3019 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3020 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3021 in existence.
3022
3023 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3024 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3025 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3026 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3027 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3028 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3029
3030 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3031 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3032 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3033 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3034
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003035- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3036 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3037 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3038
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003039- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3040
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003041- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3042 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3043 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3044 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3045
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003046- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3047 argument.
3048
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003049- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3050 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3051 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3052 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3053 [SF patch 560794].
3054
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003055- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3056 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3057 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003058 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3059 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3060 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003061
3062- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3063 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003064
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003065- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3066 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3067 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3068 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003069
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003070- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3071 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3072 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3073 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3074 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3075
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003076- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003077
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003078- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3079
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003080- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3081 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3082 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3083 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3084 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3085 identical to None.
3086
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003087- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3088 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3089 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3090 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3091 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3092 results now.
3093
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003094- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3095 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3096
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003097- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3098 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3099 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3100 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3101 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3102 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3103 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3104 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3105
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003106- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3107
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003108- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3109 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3110
3111- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3112 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3113 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3114 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3115 and other systems.
3116
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003117- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3118 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3119 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3120 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 +00003121 work well with these.
3122
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003123- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3124
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003125- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003126 connections.
3127
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003128- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3129 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3130 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3131
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003132- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3133 sets
3134
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003135- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3136 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3137 name.
3138
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003139- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3140 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3141 passed in.
3142
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003143- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003144 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003145 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3146 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003147
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003148- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3149
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003150- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3151
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003152- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3153 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3154 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3155
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003156- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3157 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3158 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3159 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003160 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003161
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003162- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003163 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003164 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003165
3166- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3167 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3168 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3169
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003170- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003171 the value of its expression argument.
3172
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003173- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3174 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3175 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3176
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003177- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3178 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3179 skipstone browser was included.
3180
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003181- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3182 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3183
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003184Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003186
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003187- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3188 names in addition to accepting file names.
3189
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003190- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3191 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3192 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3193 still used and useful.)
3194
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003195- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3196 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3197 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3198 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003199
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003200- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3201 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3202 the generated binary.
3203
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003204Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003206
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003207- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3208
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003209- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3210 except in the hands of experts.
3211
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003212- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003213 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3214 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3215 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003216
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003217- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3218 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3219 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3220 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3221 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3222 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3223 builds.
3224
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003225- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3226 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3227 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3228 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3229 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3230 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3231 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3232 new type.
3233
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003234- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003235
3236 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3237 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3238 positive infinities.
3239
3240 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3241 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3242 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3243 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3244 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3245 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3246 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3247
3248 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3249
3250 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3251
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003252- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3253 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3254 size of the executable.
3255
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003256- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3257 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3258 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3259 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003260
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003261- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3262
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003263- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3264 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3265 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003266
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003267- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3268 well as Unix.
3269
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003270- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3271 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3272 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3273 modules in the README file for details.
3274
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003275C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003277
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003278- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3279 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003280 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003281 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003282 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003283
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003284- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3285 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3286 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3287 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3288 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3289 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003290 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003291 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3292 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3293 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3294 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3295 aligned.)
3296
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003297- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3298 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3299 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3300
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003301- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3302 level.
3303
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003304- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3305 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3306 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3307 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3308 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3309
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003310- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3311 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3312 code.
3313
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003314- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3315 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3316 adjusting for negative indices.
3317
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003318- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3319 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3320 object.
3321
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003322- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3323 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3324 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3325
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003326- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3327 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003328
3329- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3330
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003331- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3332 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3333 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3334 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3335
3336- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3337
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003338- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003339
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003340- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003341 without going through the buffer API.
3342
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003344
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003345- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3346 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3347 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3348 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3349
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003350- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3351 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3352
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003353- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003354 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3355
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003356New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003358
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003359- OpenVMS is now supported.
3360
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003361- AtheOS is now supported.
3362
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003363- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3364
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003365- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3366
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003367Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003368-----
3369
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003370- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3371 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3372 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003373
3374Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003376
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003377- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3378 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3379 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3380 bugs.
3381 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003382 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003383 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3384 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003385 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003386
3387- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003388 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003389
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003390- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3391 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3392
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003393- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3394 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003395 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003396 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3397
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003398- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3399 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3400 use files" uninstall option).
3401
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003402- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3403
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003404- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3405 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3406
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003407- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3408 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3409 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3410
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003411- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3412 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3413 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3414 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3415 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003416 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3417 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3418 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003419
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003420- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003421 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003422 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3423 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3424 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3425 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3426 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3427 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3428 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3429 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3430 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3431 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3432 work around.
3433
3434- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3435 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3436 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3437 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3438 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3439 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3440 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3441 specified with O_CREAT too).
3442
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003443Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444----
3445
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003446- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003447
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003448- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3449 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3450 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3451
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003452- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3453 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3454 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3455
3456- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3457 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3458 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3459 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3460 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3461 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3462 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3463 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003464
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003465- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3466 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3467 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003468
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003469- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3470 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3471 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3472 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3473 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003474
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003475- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3476 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3477 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003478
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003479- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3480 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003481
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003482- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3483 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3484 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3485 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3486 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003487
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003488- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3489 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3490 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3491
3492- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3493 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3494 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003495
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003496- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3497 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3498 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3499 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003500 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003501
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003502- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3503 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003504
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003505- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3506 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003507
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003508- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003509 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003510 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3511 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003512
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003513
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003514What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003515===============================
3516
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3518
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003519Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003521
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003522- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3523 with a custom metaclass.
3524
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003525Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003527
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003528- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3529 are proxies.
3530
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003531Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003533
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003534- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3535 very short strings.
3536
3537- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3538 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3539 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3540 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3541 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3542
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003543Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003545
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003546- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3547 close or delete time).
3548
3549- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3550 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3551
3552- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3553
3554- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003555 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003556
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003557Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003559
3560Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003562
3563C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003565
3566New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003568
3569Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003571
3572Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003574
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003575- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3576
3577- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3578 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3579
3580- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3581 deleted at process exit time.
3582
3583- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3584 in backslash.
3585
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003586Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003588
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003589- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3590 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3591 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3592
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003593
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003594What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003595===========================
3596
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003597*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3598
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003599Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003601
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003602- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3603 been extensively updated. See
3604
3605 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3606
3607 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3608
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003609- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3610 deleted!
3611
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003612- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3613 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3614 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3615 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3616 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3617
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003618- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3619
3620 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3621 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3622
3623 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3624 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3625 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3626 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3627 supported anyway.
3628
3629 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3630 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3631
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003632- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3633 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3634 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3635 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3636 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003637
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003638- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3639 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3640 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3641
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003642Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003644
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003645- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3646 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3647 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3648 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3649 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3650 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003651 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3652 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3653 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3654 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003655
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003656- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3657 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3658 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3659
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003660Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003661-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003662
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003663- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3664
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003665Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003666-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003667
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003668- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3669 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3670 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3671 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3672 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3673 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3674
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003675- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3676
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003677- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3678
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003679- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3680
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003681- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3682 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3683 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3684
3685- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3686
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003687Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003689
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003690- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3691 off a search on Google.
3692
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003693Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003695
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003696- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3697 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3698 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3699 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3700 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3701 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3702 other platforms should do likewise.
3703
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003704- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3705 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3706 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3707
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003708C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003710
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003711- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3712 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3713 producing key-value pairs.
3714
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003715- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003716 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003717 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3718 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3719 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3720 previously went unchallenged.
3721
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003722New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003723-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003724
3725Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003727
3728Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003730
3731Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003733
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003734- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3735 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003736
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003737- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3738 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3739 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3740 home.
3741
3742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003743What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003744===========================
3745
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3747
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003748Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003750
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003751- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3752 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003753
3754 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003755 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003756
3757 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3758 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003759 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003760 This needs to be documented.
3761
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003762- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3763 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3764
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003765- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3766 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3767 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3768
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003769- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3770 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3771
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003772- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3773 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3774 class forbids it).
3775
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003776- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3777 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3778 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3779
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003780- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3781
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003782Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003784
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003785- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3786 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003787 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003788
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003789- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3790 (like 1 + '').
3791
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003792Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003794
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003795- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3796 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3797 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3798 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003799 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003800 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3801
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003802- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3803 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3804 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3805 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3806
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003807- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3808 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003809 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3810 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3811 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003812
3813- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3814 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003815
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003816- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3817 bytes on its input.
3818
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003819Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003821
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003822- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003823 convenience function.
3824
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003825- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3826 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3827 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003828 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3829 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3830 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3831 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3832 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3833 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003834
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003835- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3836 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3837 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3838 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3839
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003840- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3841 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3842 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3843
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003844- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3845 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3846 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3847 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3848
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003849- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3850 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003851 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003852 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3853 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3854 new -l and -e options.
3855
3856- statcache is now deprecated.
3857
3858- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3859 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003861 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3862 time properly taken into account.
3863
3864- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3865 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3866 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3867 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003869Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003871
3872Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003874
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003875- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3876 is built with libdb3 if available.
3877
3878- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3879
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003880C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003882
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003883- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3884 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3885 PySequence_Size().
3886
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003887- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3888
3889- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3890 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3891 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3892
3893- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3894 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3895
3896- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3897 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003899New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003901
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003902- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3903 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3904
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003905- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3906 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3907
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003908- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3909
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003910Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003912
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003913- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3914 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3915
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003916Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003918
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003919Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003921
3922- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3923 removed completely in the next release.
3924
3925- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3926 OSX.
3927
3928- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3929 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3930
3931- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3932
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003933
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003934What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003935===========================
3936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3938
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003939Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003941
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003942- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003943 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003944 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003945 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3946 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003947 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3948 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003949 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3950 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003951
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003952- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3953 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3954
3955- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3956 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3957
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003958Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003960
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003961- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3962 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3963 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3964 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3965 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3966 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3967 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3968 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3969
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003970- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3971 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3972 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3973 example).
3974
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003975- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003976 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003977 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003978 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003979
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003980- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3981 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3982 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003983 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003984
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003985- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3986 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3987 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3988 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3989 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3990 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3991
3992 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3993
3994 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3995
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003996Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003998
3999- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4000
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004001- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4002
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004003- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4004 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004005
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004006- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4007 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4008 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4009 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4010 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4011 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004012 attributes.
4013
4014- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4015 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4016 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004017
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004018- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4019 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4020 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004021
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004022- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4023 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4024 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004025 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4026 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4027
4028- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4029 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004030
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004031Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004033
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004034- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4035 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4036
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004037- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4038 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4039 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4040 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4041
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004042- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4043 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4044 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4045 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4046
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004047 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4048 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4049 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4050 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4051 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4052 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4053 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4054 without losing information).
4055
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004056- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004057 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4058 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4059 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4060 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4061 module).
4062
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004063 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004064 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4065 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4066 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4067 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004068
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004069- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004070 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4071 encoding.
4072
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004073- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4074 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4075
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004077 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4078
4079- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4080 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4081 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4082 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4083
4084- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4085
4086- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4087 ON, and OFF.
4088
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004089- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4090 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4091
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004092Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004094
4095- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4096 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4097 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004098
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004099- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4100 been added: -X and -E.
4101
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004102Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004104
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004105- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4106 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4107
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004108C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004110
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004111- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4112 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4113 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4114 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4115 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4116
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004117- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4118 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4119 as long) arguments.
4120
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004121- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4122 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4123 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4124 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4125 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4126 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4127
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004128- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4129 input.
4130
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004131New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004133
4134Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004136
4137Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004139
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004140- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4141 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4142 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4143
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004144- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4145 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4146 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004147 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004148
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4150 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4151 import signal
4152 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004153
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004155 while 1:
4156 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004158 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4159 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4160 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4161 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004162
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004163
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004164What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4165===========================
4166
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4168
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004169Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004171
4172- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4173 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4174 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4175
4176- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4177 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4178 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4179 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4180 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4181 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4182 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004183
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004184- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004185 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004186 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4187 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4188 associate a docstring with a property.
4189
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004190- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4191 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4192 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4193 other built-in object types.
4194
4195- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4196 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4197 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4198 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4199 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4200
4201- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4202 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4203
4204- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4205 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004206 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004207 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4208 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4209 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4210 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4211 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4212
4213- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4214 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4215 class.
4216
4217- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4218 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4219 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4220 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4221
4222- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4223 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4224 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4225 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4226
4227- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4228 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4229
4230- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4231 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4232 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4233 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4234 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004235 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004236 with the same value as s.
4237
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004238- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4239
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004240Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004242
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004243- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4244
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004245- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4246 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4247 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4248 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4249 objects.
4250
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004251- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4252 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004253 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4254 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4255
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004256- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4257 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4258 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4259
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004260Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004262
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004263- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4264 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4265 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4266 by the instances.
4267
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004268- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4269 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4270 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4271
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004272- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4273 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4274 before the entire comparison is complete.
4275
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004276- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4277 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4278 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4279
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004280- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4281 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4282 getwriter().
4283
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004284- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4285 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4286
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004287- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004288 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4289 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4290
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004291- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4292 iterable object.
4293
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004294- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4295 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004296
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004297- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4298 authentication.
4299
4300- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4301 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004302
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004303- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004304 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4305 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4306 a sample driver.)
4307
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004308Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004310
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004311- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4312 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4313 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4314 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4315 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4316 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4317 kernel has large file support.
4318
4319- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4320 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4321 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4322 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4323 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4324
4325- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4326 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4327 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4328
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004329C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004331
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004332- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4333 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4334
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004335New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004337
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004338- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4339 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4340
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004341Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004343
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004344- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4345 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4346 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4347 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4348 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4349
4350- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4351 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4352 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4353 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4354
4355- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4356 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4357
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004358Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004360
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004361- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004362 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4363 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004364
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004365
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004366What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4367===========================
4368
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4370
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004371Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004373
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004374- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4375 big to represent as a C double.
4376
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004377- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4378 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4379 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4380 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4381 restriction).
4382
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004383- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4384 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4385 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4386 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4387 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4388
4389 >>> dir([])
4390 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4391 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4392 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4393 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4394 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4395 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4396 'reverse', 'sort']
4397
4398 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4399
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004400- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004401 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4402 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4403 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4404 OverflowError exception.
4405
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004406- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004407 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004408 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4409 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4410 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4411 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4412 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004413 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4415 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4416
4417 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4418 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4419 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4420 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004421
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004422- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004423 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4424 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4425 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4426 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4427 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4428 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4429 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4430 once it is created.
4431
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004432- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4433 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4434 (key, value) pairs.
4435
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004436- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004437 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4438 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4439
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004440- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4441 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4442 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4443 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4444 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004445
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004446- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004447 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4448 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4449
4450 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4451
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004452- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004453 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4454
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004455Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004457
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004458- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004459 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4460 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004461
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004462- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4463 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4464 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4465 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4466 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4467 in this area anymore).
4468
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004469- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4470 threading.Timer.
4471
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004472- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4473 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4474
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004475- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004476 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4477
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004478- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004479 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4480 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4481 converted to Python longs.
4482
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004483- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004484 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4485
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004486- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4487 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4488 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4489
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004490Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004492
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004493- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4494 division operators as per PEP 238.
4495
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004496Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004498
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004499- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4500 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4501 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4502 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4503
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004504C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004506
4507- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004508
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004509- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4510 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004511 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004512
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4514 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004515 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004517
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004518- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004519 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4520 module:
4521
4522 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004523
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004524 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4525 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004526
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004527 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4528 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004529
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004530 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4531
4532 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4533
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004534- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004535 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4536 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4537 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004538
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004539New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004541
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004542- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4543 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4544 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4545 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4546 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004547
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004548Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004550
4551Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004553
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004554- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4555 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4556 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4557 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004558 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4559 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4560 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4561 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4562 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004563
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004564- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004565 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4566
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004567
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004568What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4569===========================
4570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4572
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004573Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004575
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004576- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4577 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4578
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004579- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4580 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4581 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004582
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004583- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4584 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4585 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4586 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004587
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004588- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4589
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004591
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004592Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004594
4595- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004596 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004597 the module docstring for details.
4598
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004599Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004601
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004602- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004603 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4604 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4605 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004606
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004607- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4608 Nick Mathewson.
4609
4610Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004612
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004613- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4614 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4615 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4616 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4617 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4618 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4619 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4620 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4621
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004622- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4623 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4624 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4625 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4626
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004627- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4628 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4629 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4630 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4631 come a long way).
4632
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004633- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4634 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4635 write filters for these warnings).
4636
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004637- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4638 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4639 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4640 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4641 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4642
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004643- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4644 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4645 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4646 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4647 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4648 older distribution.
4649
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004650Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004652
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004653- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4654 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004655 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004656
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004657- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4658 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4659 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4660
4661- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4662
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004663- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4664
4665- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4666
4667- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004670
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004671- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4672
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004673New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004674-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004675
4676C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004678
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004679- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4680 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4681 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4682 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4683 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4684 against buffer overruns.
4685
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004686- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004687 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4688 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004689 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4690 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4691 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4692
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004693- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4694 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4695 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4696 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4697 deprecated.
4698
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004699Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004701
4702- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4703 relevant is found.
4704
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004705
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004706What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004707===========================
4708
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4710
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004711Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004713
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004714- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4715 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4716 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4717 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4718 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4719 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4720 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4721 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004722 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004723 repaired.
4724
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004725- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004726 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004727 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4728 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4729 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4730 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4731 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4732 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4733 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4734 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4735
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004736- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4737 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4738 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4739 leading BMO character).
4740
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004741- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4742 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4743 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4744
4745 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4746 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4747 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004748
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004749 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4750 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4751 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4752 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4753 for various simple to use conversions.
4754
4755 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4756 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4757
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004758 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4759 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4760 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4761 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4762 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4763 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4764 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4765 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4766 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4767 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4768 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4769 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4770 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4771 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4772 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004773
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004774- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4775 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4776 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004777 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004778 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004779
4780 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004781 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4782 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4783 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4784 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4785 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004786 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4787 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004788
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004789 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4790 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4791 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004792 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004793
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004794- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4795 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4796 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4797 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4798 floating arithmetic,
4799
4800 x = 9007199254740992.0
4801 print long(x)
4802
4803 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4804 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4805 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4806 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4807 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4808 functions are of good quality).
4809
4810 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4811 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4812 algorithms to break.
4813
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004814- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4815 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4816 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4817 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4818 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4819 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4820 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4821 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4822 order.
4823
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004824- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4825 operation along the most common code paths.
4826
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004827- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4828 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4829
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004830- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4831 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4832 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4833 {}.update(UserDict())
4834
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004835- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4836 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4837 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4838 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4839 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4840 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4841 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4842 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4843
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004844- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004845 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004846
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004847 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004848 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4849 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004850 join() method of strings
4851 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004852 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4853 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004854 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004855 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004856
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004857- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4858 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4859
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004860- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4861 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4862
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004863- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4864 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4865 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4866 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4867
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004868- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4869 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004870 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004871 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4872 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004873
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004874- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4875
4876
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004877Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004879
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004880- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004881 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004882 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4883 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4884
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004885- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4886 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4887
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004888- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4889 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4890 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4891 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4892
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004893- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4894 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4895 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4896
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004897- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4898
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004899- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4900
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004901- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4902 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4903 that are still imported into string.py).
4904
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004905- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4906
4907- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4908 Now it does.
4909
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004910- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4911
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004912- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4913 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4914 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4915 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4916 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004917 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4918 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004919
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004920- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4921 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4922 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4923 'help(object)'.
4924
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004925Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004926-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004927
4928- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004929 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004930 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4931 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4932
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004933- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004934 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4935 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004936
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004937C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004939
4940- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4941 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004942
4943----
4944
4945**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**