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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
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000015Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
16interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
17example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
18via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
19to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
20
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000021Extension modules
22-----------------
23
24Library
25-------
26
27Tools/Demos
28-----------
29
30Build
31-----
32
33C API
34-----
35
36Documentation
37-------------
38
39New platforms
40-------------
41
42Tests
43-----
44
45Windows
46-------
47
48Mac
49---
50
51
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
53=================================
54
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000055*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000056
57Core and builtins
58-----------------
59
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +000060- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
61 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
62 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
63 sensitive code.
64
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000065- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
66 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
67 @staticmethod
68 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000069 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000070
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000071- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
72 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
73 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
74 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
75 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
76 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
77 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
78 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
79 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
80 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
81 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
82
83 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
84 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
85 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
86 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
87 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
88 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
89 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
90
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000091- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
92 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
93
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000094- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000095 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000096
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000097- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000098 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000099 which was missing for no apparent reason.
100
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000101- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000102 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
103 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
104
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000105- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
106 types that support garbage collection.
107
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000108- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
109
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000110- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
111 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
112 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
113 Jython.
114
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000115- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
116
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000117- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
118 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
119
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000120- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
121 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
122 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000123
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000124- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
125 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
126 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
127
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000128Extension modules
129-----------------
130
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000131- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
132
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000133Library
134-------
135
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000136- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
137 TIS-620
138
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000139- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
140 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
141 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
142 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
143 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
144 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
145 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
146 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
147 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
148 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
149
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000150- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
151
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000152- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
153 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
154 same as when the argument is omitted).
155 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
156
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000157- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
158
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000159- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
160 schemes are offered.
161
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000162- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
163
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000164- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
165 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
166 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
167
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000168- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
169
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000170- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
171 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
172
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000173- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
174 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
175 when dummy_threading is being used.
176
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000177- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
178 from a tarfile.
179
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000180- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000181 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000182
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000183- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
184 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
185 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
186 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
187
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000188- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
189 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
190
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000191- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
192 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
193 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
194 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
195 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
196 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
197 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
198 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
199 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
200 by some other method in progress).
201
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000202- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
203 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
204 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000205
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000206- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
207
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000208- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
209 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
210 AM Kuchling.
211
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000212- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
213 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
214 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
215
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000216- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
217 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
218 instead of unsigned.
219
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000220- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000221 no longer part of the public API.
222
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000223- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
224 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
225 string methods of the same name).
226
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000227- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
228 SF patch 982681.
229
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000230- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000231 SF patch 945642.
232
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000233- doctest unittest integration improvements:
234
235 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
236
237 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
238 DocTestSuites.
239
240- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
241 that provide thread-local data.
242
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000243- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
244 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
245
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000246- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
247
248- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
249 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
250 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
251
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000252- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
253
254 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
255 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
256 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000257
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000258 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
259 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
260 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
261 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
262
263 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
264 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
265
266 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
267 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
268 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
269 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
270
271 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
272 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
273 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
274 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
275 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
276
277 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
278 wrapping help output.
279
280 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
281 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
282 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000283
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000284C API
285-----
286
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000287- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
288 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
289 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
290 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
291 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
292 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
293 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
294 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
295 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
296 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
297 its visible semantics have not changed.
298
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000299- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
300 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
301
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000302Documentation
303-------------
304
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000305- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000306
307 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000308 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000309
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000310 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000311
312 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
313
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000314- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000315
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000316Tests
317-----
318
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000319- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000320 platforms that use the Makefile.
321
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000322- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
323 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
324 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
325
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000326
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000327What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
328=================================
329
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000330*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000331
332Core and builtins
333-----------------
334
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000335- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
336 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
337 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
338 objects now (one object instead of three).
339
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000340- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
341 Windows DLLs.
342
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000343- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
344 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000345
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000346- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
347 a new .pyc magic.
348
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000349- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
350 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
351 be there.
352
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000353- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
354 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
355 the LC_NUMERIC category.
356
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000357- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
358 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
359 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
360
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000361- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
362
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000363- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
364 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
365 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000366
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000367- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
368 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
369
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000370- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
371
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000372- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000373 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000374
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000375- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
376
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000377- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
378
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000379- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
380 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
381
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000382- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
383 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
384 Fixes bug #858016 .
385
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000386- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
387 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
388 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
389
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000390- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
391 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
392 improves their performance (about 35%).
393
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000394- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
395 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
396 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
397
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000398- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
399 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
400 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
401 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
402
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000403- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
404 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
405 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
406 length is not known).
407
408- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
409 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000410 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
411 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000412 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
413
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000414- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
415 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
416
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000417- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
418 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
419 keyword arguments.
420
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000421- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
422 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
423 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
424
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000425- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
426 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
427 cases.
428
429- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
430 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
431 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
432 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
433 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
434 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
435 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
436 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
437 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
438 a release build.
439
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000440- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
441 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
442
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000443- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000444 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000445
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000446- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
447 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
448 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
449 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
450 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
451 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
452 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
453 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
454 destroyed.
455
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000456- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
457 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
458 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
459 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
460 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
461 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
462 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
463 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
464
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000465- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
466 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
467 character other than a space.
468
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000469- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
470 by the function object or by the method object, the function
471 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
472 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
473 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
474 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
475 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
476 attributes with the same name.
477
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000478- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
479 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
480 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
481 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
482 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
483 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
484 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
485 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
486 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
487 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
488 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
489 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
490 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
491 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000492
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000493- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
494 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
495 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
496 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
497 This has been repaired.
498
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000499- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
500
501- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
502
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000503- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
504 over a sequence.
505
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000506- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000507 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000508
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000509- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
510
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000511- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
512 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
513 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
514 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
515 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
516 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
517 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
518 records with equal keys is unchanged).
519
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000520- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
521 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
522 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
523
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000524- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
525 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
526 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
527 freelist.
528
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000529- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
530 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
531
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000532- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
533 number.
534
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000535- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
536 a TypeError exception.
537
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000538- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
539 820195.
540
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000541- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
542 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
543 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
544
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000545- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000546 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
547 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000548
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000549- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
550 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
551 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
552
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000553- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
554 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000555 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000556
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000557- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000558 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
559 the first call.
560
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000561
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000562Extension modules
563-----------------
564
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000565- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
566 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
567
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000568- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
569 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
570 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
571 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
572 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
573 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
574 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000575
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000576- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
577
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000578- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
579
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000580- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
581 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
582
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000583- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
584 fewer false positives.
585
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000586- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
587 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
588
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000589- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000590 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
591
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000592- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000593 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000594 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
595 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
596 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000597
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000598- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
599 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
600 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
601 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
602
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000603- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
604 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
605 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
606 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
607 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
608 #897625.
609
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000610- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
611 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
612
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000613- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
614 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
615 and pops on either side of the deque.
616
617- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
618 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
619
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000620- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
621 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
622 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
623 other functions that expect a function argument.
624
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000625- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
626
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000627- os.getsid was added.
628
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000629- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
630 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
631 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
632
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000633- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
634
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000635- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
636
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000637- readline.clear_history was added.
638
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000639- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
640
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000641- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
642
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000643- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
644
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000645- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
646
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000647- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
648
649- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
650
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000651- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
652
653- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
654
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000655- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
656 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
657 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
658
659- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
660 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
661 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
662 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
663 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
664 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
665 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
666
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000667- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
668 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
669 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
670 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000671
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000672- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000673 iterators from a single iterable.
674
675- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
676 of raising a TypeError exception.
677
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000678- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
679 as parameter.
680
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000681Library
682-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000683
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000684- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
685 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
686 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000687
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000688- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
689 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
690 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000691
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000692- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000693
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000694- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
695 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000696
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000697- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
698 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
699
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000700- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
701
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000702- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000703 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000704
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000705- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
706 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
707
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000708- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
709
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000710- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
711 on cygwin and mingw32.
712
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000713- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
714
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000715- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
716 module.
717
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000718- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
719 installation scheme for all platforms.
720
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000721- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000722 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000723
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000724- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
725 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
726 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
727
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000728- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
729 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
730 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
731
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000732- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
733
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000734- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
735
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000736- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
737 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
738
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000739- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
740 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
741 type pattern with the same value exists.
742
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000743- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
744 when run from the command prompt).
745
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000746- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
747 not taken into consideration when caching value.
748
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000749- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
750 default sort).
751
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000752- Added global runctx function to profile module
753
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000754- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
755
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000756- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
757
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000758- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
759
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000760- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000761 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
762 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
763 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
764 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
765 accordingly.
766
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000767- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
768 decoding standards.
769
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000770- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
771 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
772 called for all requests.
773
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000774- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
775 they are passed to the compiler.
776
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000777- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
778 indent, width and depth.
779
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000780- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
781 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
782
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000783- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
784 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
785
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000786- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
787
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000788- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
789
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000790- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
791
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000792- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
793 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
794
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000795- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000796 for better performance.
797
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000798- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000799
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000800- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
801 a string).
802
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000803- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
804
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000805- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
806
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000807- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
808
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000809- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
810
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000811- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
812 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
813 list of fieldnames.
814
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000815- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
816 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
817
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000818- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
819
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000820- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
821 empty lists.
822
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000823- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
824 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
825 and shelves.
826
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000827- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
828 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
829
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000830- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000831 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
832 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000833
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000834- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
835 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000836 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000837
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000838- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000839 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
840 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
841
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000842- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
843 and removed in Py2.4.
844
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000845- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
846
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000847- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
848
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000849Tools/Demos
850-----------
851
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000852- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
853 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
854
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000855- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
856
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000857- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
858 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
859 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
860 destination in situations where both files are given.
861
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000862- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
863 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
864 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
865 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
866
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000867- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
868
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000869- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
870 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
871 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
872 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
873 now.
874
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000875- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
876 in effect
877
878- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
879 C-c C-h
880
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000881- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
882 -d option was given.
883
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000884Build
885-----
886
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000887- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
888 build under OS X.
889
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000890- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
891 --enable-profiling.
892
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000893- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
894 is configured --with-tsc.
895
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000896- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
897 on AMD64.
898
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000899- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
900 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
901
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000902- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
903 removed.
904
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000905- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
906 supported (see PEP 11).
907
908- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
909
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000910- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
911
912- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
913 (see PEP 11).
914
915- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
916 sizeof(char) must be 1.
917
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000918C API
919-----
920
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000921- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
922 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
923 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
924
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000925- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
926 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
927 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
928 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
929
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000930- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
931 generator objects.
932
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000933- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
934 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000935 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
936 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000937
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000938- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
939 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
940
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000941- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
942 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
943 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
944 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
945 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
946
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000947- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
948 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
949 about 10% faster.
950
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000951- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
952 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
953
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000954- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
955 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
956 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
957 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
958
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000959Windows
960-------
961
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000962- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
963 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
964 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
965 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
966
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000967- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
968 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
969 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
970
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000971
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000972What's New in Python 2.3 final?
973===============================
974
975*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
976
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000977IDLE
978----
979
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000980- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
981 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
982 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
983 context-menu actions.
984
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000985- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
986 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
987 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
988 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
989 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
990 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
991 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
992 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
993 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
994
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000995
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000996What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
997=============================================
998
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000999*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001000
1001Core and builtins
1002-----------------
1003
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001004- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001005 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001006 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1007
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001008Extension modules
1009-----------------
1010
1011- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1012 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1013 than once. This has been fixed.
1014
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001015- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1016 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1017 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1018 call.
1019
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001020- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1021
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001022Library
1023-------
1024
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001025- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1026 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1027
1028- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1029 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1030 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1031 restored.
1032
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001033IDLE
1034----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001035
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001036- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001037
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001038Build
1039-----
1040
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001041- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1042 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1043
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001044C API
1045-----
1046
1047Windows
1048-------
1049
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001050- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1051 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1052
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001053- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1054
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001055Mac
1056---
1057
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001058- Various fixes to pimp.
1059
1060- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1061
1062- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1063 more problems than it solves.
1064
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001065
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001066What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1067=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001068
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001069*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1070
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001071Core and builtins
1072-----------------
1073
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001074- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1075 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1076
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001077- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1078 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001079 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001080
1081- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1082 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1083 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001084 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001085
1086- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1087 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001088
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001089- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1090 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1091 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1092
1093- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001094 770247.
1095
1096- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001097
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001098Extension modules
1099-----------------
1100
1101- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1102 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1103
1104- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1105
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001106- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1107
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001108- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1109 contained within the _strptime module.
1110
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001111- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1112 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1113
1114- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001115 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1116
1117- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1118 the find_class attribute, if present.
1119
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001120- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001121
1122 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1123 (SF bug 763298).
1124
1125 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001126 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1127 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1128 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001129
1130 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1131
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001132Library
1133-------
1134
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001135- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1136
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001137- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1138 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1139 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1140 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1141 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1142 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1143 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1144 or Tester().
1145
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001146- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1147 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1148 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1149 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1150 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1151 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1152 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1153 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1154 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001155
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001156 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001157
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001158- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1159 weren't before was an oversight.
1160
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001161- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1162 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1163
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001164- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1165 when there are no lines.
1166
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001167- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1168 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1169
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001170- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1171 to child processes.
1172
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001173- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1174
1175- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1176
1177- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1178 xmlrpclib.
1179
1180- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1181 responses.
1182
1183- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1184 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1185
1186- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1187 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1188 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1189
1190- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1191 used as patterns.
1192
1193- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1194 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1195 than Tk 8.3.
1196
1197- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1198
1199- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001200
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001201Tools/Demos
1202-----------
1203
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001204- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1205
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001206- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1207
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001208- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001209
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001210Build
1211-----
1212
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001213- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1214
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001215- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1216
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001217- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1218 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001219
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001220- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1221 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1222 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001223
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001224C API
1225-----
1226
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001227- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1228 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1229
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001230Windows
1231-------
1232
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001233- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1234 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1235 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1236 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1237 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1238 Python exception ::
1239
1240 thread.error: can't start new thread
1241
1242 is raised now.
1243
1244- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1245 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1246 instead of from DLL teardown.
1247
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001248Mac
1249---
1250
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001251- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001252 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001253 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1254 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1255 the executable in the bundle.
1256
1257- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001258
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001259- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1260
1261- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1262 on Panther.
1263
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001264What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1265================================
1266
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001267*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001268
1269Core and builtins
1270-----------------
1271
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001272- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1273 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1274 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1275 with the -i option.
1276
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001277- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1278 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1279
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001280- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1281 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1282
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001283- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1284 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1285 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1286 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1287 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1288 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1289 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1290 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1291 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1292 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1293 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1294 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1295 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001296
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001297- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1298 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1299 embedded in a lambda expression.
1300
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001301- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1302 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1303 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1304 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1305 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1306
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001307- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1308 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1309 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1310
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001311- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1312 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1313
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001314- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1315 It's writable again.
1316
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001317- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1318 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1319 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001320 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001321
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001322- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1323 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1324 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1325
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001326Extension modules
1327-----------------
1328
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001329- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1330 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1331
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001332- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1333 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1334 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1335 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1336
1337- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1338 collection.
1339
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001340- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1341 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1342 unique within a single program run.
1343
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001344- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1345 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1346
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001347- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1348 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1349
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001350- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1351 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001352
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001353- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1354
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001355- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1356 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1357
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001358- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1359 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1360 for many BSD-derived systems.
1361
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001362
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001363Library
1364-------
1365
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001366- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1367 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1368 primary ones:
1369
1370 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1371 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1372 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1373
1374 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1375 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1376 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1377 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1378 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1379 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1380
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001381- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1382 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1383 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1384 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1385 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1386 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1387 argument.
1388
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001389- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1390 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1391 in the archive.
1392
1393- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1394 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1395
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001396- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1397 569574).
1398
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001399- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1400 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1401 no more.
1402
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001403- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1404 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1405 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1406 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1407 code coverage.
1408
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001409- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1410 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1411 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001412 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1413 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001414
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001415- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1416 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1417 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001418 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001419
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001420- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1421
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001422- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1423 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1424 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1425 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1426
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001427- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1428 handling.
1429
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001430- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1431 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1432
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001433- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1434 in socket.py.
1435
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001436- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1437
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001438- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1439 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1440 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1441 opener with proxy support.
1442
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001443- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1444
1445- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1446
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001447Tools/Demos
1448-----------
1449
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001450- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1451
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001452- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1453
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001454- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1455 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001456
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001457- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1458 files.
1459
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001460Build
1461-----
1462
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001463- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001464 different root directory.
1465
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001466C API
1467-----
1468
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001469- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1470 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1471 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1472 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1473 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1474 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1475 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1476 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1477 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1478 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1479
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001480- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1481 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1482 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1483 from Python.
1484
1485
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001486New platforms
1487-------------
1488
1489None this time.
1490
1491Tests
1492-----
1493
1494- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1495 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1496
1497Windows
1498-------
1499
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001500- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1501
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001502- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1503 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1504 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1505 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1506 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1507 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1508 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1509 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1510 that's what it's for.
1511
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001512Mac
1513---
1514
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001515- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1516 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1517 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1518 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001519- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1520 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1521- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001522
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001523SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1524------------------------------------
1525
1526430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1527598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1528622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1529661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1530683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1531697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1532713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1533724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1534727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1535729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1536730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1537731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1538732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1539733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1540735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1541740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1542744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1543745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1544747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1545749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1546751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1547753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1548755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1549757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1550760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1551
1552
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001553What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1554================================
1555
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001556*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001557
1558Core and builtins
1559-----------------
1560
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001561- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1562 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1563
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001564- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1565 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1566 and cannot be strings).
1567
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001568- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1569 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1570 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1571 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1572
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001573- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1574 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1575 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1576 Python itself.
1577
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001578- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1579 the referenced object, if it has one.
1580
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001581- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1582 the thread started at
1583 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1584
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001585- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1586 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1587 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1588 placed on a list index.
1589
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001590- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1591 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1592 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1593 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1594
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001595- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1596 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1597 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1598 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1599 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1600 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1601 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1602
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001603- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1604 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1605 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1606 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1607 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1608
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001609- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1610 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001611
1612- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1613 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1614 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1615 #693195.)
1616
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001617- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1618 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001619
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001620- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001621 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001622 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1623 interpreter executions, would fail.
1624
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001625- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001626 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001627 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001628
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001629Extension modules
1630-----------------
1631
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001632- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1633 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1634 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1635 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1636
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001637- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1638 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1639
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001640- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1641 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1642 and Greg Chapman.)
1643
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001644- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1645 recursively.
1646
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001647- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001648 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1649 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1650 leaks.
1651
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001652- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1653
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001654- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1655 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1656 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1657 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1658 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1659 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1660 #705836.
1661
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001662- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001663 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1664
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001665- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1666 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1667 See SF bug #692416.
1668
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001669- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1670 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1671
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001672- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1673 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1674 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001675
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001676- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001677 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1678 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1679
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001680- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1681 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1682 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1683 timeouts to work properly.
1684
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001685Library
1686-------
1687
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001688- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1689 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1690 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1691 future release.
1692
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001693- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1694 for querying platform dependent features.
1695
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001696- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001697
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001698- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1699 pickle protocol versions.
1700
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001701- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1702 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1703 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1704
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001705- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1706
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001707- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1708 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1709 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1710 modules.
1711
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001712- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1713 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1714 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1715
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001716- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1717 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1718
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001719- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1720 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1721 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1722
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001723- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001724 MS Office extensions.
1725
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001726- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1727 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1728
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001729- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1730 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1731
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001732- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1733 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1734 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1735 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1736 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1737 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1738
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001739- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1740 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1741 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001742
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001743- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1744 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1745 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1746
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001747- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1748
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001749- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1750 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1751 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1752
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001753Tools/Demos
1754-----------
1755
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001756- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1757 See the module docstring for details.
1758
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001759Build
1760-----
1761
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001762- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1763 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001764
1765C API
1766-----
1767
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001768- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1769
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001770- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1771 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1772 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1773
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001774- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1775 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001776
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001777 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1778 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1779 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001780
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001781- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001782 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1783
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001784- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1785 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1786 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001787
1788New platforms
1789-------------
1790
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001791None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001792
1793Tests
1794-----
1795
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001796- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1797 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001798
1799Windows
1800-------
1801
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001802- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1803 function.
1804
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001805- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1806 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001807
1808Mac
1809---
1810
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001811- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1812 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001813
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001814- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1815 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001816
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001817- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1818 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1819 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001820
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001821- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001822 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1823 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001824
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001825- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1826 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001827
1828
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001829What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1830=================================
1831
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001832*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001833
1834Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001835-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001836
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001837- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1838 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1839 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1840
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001841- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1842 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1843 (SF patch #664376.)
1844
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001845- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1846 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1847 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1848 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1849 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1850 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001851 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001852
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001853- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1854 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1855 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1856 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001857 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001858
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001859- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1860 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1861 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1862 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1863 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1864 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1865 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1866 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1867 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1868 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1869 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1870
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001871- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1872 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1873 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1874 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1875 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1876 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1877
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001878- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1879 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1880
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001881- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1882 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1883 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1884 case.)
1885
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001886- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1887 passed as unicode strings.
1888
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001889- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1890 See SF bug #683467.
1891
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001892- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1893 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1894
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001895- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1896
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001897- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1898
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001899- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1900 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1901 arguments.
1902
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001903- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1904 See SF bug #667147.
1905
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001906- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001907 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001908 See SF bug #676155.
1909
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001910- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001911 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001912 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1913 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1914 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1915 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1916 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1917 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001918
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001919Extension modules
1920-----------------
1921
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001922- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1923 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1924 tp_as_number pointer.
1925
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001926- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1927 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1928 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1929 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1930 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1931
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001932- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1933
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001934- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1935
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001936- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001937 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001938 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1939 patch #678531.)
1940
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001941- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1942 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1943
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001944- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1945 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1946
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001947- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1948
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001949- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1950 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1951 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1952
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001953- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1954
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001955- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1956 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1957
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001958- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001959
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001960- datetime changes:
1961
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001962 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1963
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001964 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1965 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1966 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1967 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1968 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1969 now.
1970
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001971 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001972 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1973 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001974
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001975 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001976 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001977 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1978 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1979 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1980 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001981
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001982 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1983 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1984 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001985 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1986
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001987 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1988 by a later example coded by Guido.
1989
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001990 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001991 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1992 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1993 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001994 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1995 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1996
1997 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1998 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1999 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2000 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2001 tzinfo subclass instance.
2002
2003 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2004 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2005 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2006 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2007 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2008 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2009 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2010 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002011
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002012 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2013 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2014 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2015 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2016 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002017 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2018
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002019 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002020
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002021 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2022 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2023 as a naive datetime object.
2024
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002025 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2026 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2027 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2028
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002029 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2030 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2031 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2032 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2033 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2034 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2035 comparison.
2036
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002037 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2038 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2039 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2040 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002041 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002042
2043 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002044
2045 and ::
2046
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002047 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2048
2049 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2050 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2051 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2052 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2053
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002054 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2055 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2056 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2057 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2058 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2059
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002060 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2061 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002062 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2063 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002064
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002065Library
2066-------
2067
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002068- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2069 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2070
2071- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2072 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2073 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2074 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2075 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2076 See PEP 307 for details.
2077
2078- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2079 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2080
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002081- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2082 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002083 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002084 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2085 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002086 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002087
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002088- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2089 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2090
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002091- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2092 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2093 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2094
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002095- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2096
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002097- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2098 exception.
2099
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002100- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2101 class.
2102
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002103- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2104 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2105 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2106
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002107- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2108 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2109
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002110- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002111 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2112 See SF bug #659228.
2113
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002114- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2115 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2116 See SF patch #651082.
2117
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002118- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002119
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002120- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2121 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2122
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002123- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002124 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002125
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002126- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2127 DOS paths from other platforms.
2128
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002129Tools/Demos
2130-----------
2131
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002132- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2133 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2134 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2135 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2136 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2137 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2138 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2139 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2140 example:
2141
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002142 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2143 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002144
2145 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2146
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002147
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002148Build
2149-----
2150
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002151- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2152 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2153 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002154 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2155
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002156 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2157
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002158- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2159 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2160 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2161 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2162 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2163 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2164 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2165 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2166 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2167
2168- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2169 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2170 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2171 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2172
2173- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2174 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2175
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002176C API
2177-----
2178
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002179- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2180 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002181
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002182- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2183 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2184 tp_as_number pointer.
2185
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002186- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2187 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2188 (SF #681367)
2189
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002190- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2191 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2192 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2193 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002194
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002195Tests
2196-----
2197
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002198- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002199 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2200 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2201 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2202 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2203 pydoc.)
2204
2205- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2206
2207- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002208
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002209Windows
2210-------
2211
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002212- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2213 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2214 time).
2215
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002216- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2217 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2218
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002219- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2220 release without strong cryptography.
2221
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002222- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002223 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002224
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002225- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2226 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2227
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002228Mac
2229---
2230
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002231- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2232 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002233
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002234- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2235 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2236 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002237
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002238- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2239 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002240
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002241- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2242 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2243 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2244 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002245
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002246- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002247 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2248 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2249 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002250
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002251
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002252What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002253=================================
2254
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002255*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002256
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002257Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002258--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002259
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002260- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2261
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002262- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2263 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002264 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002265 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002266 a different meaning than before.
2267
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002268- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002269 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002270 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002271
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002272- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002273 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002274 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002275
2276- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2277 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2278 and deallocation.
2279
2280- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2281 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2282
2283- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2284 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2285 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2286 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2287 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2288
2289- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2290 now detected by the garbage collector.
2291
2292- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2293 [SF bug 519621]
2294
2295- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2296 identifier.
2297
2298- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2299 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2300 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2301 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2302 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2303 [SF bug 563060]
2304
2305- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2306 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2307 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2308 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2309 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2310
2311- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2312 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2313 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2314
2315- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2316
2317- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2318 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2319 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2320 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2321 state of the slots would be lost.)
2322
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002323Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002324-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002325
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002326- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002327 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2328 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2329 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2330 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002331 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2332 Jython 2.1.
2333
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002334- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002335 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002336 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2337 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2338 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2339 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2340 these, see PEP 302.
2341
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002342- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2343 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2344 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2345
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002346- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2347 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2348 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2349
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002350- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2351 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2352 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2353
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002354- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2355 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2356 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2357 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2358 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2359 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2360 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2361 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2362 releases or implementations.
2363
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002364- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002365 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2366 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002367
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002368- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2369 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2370
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002371- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2372 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2373 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2374
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002375- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2376 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2377
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002378- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2379 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002380 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2381 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002382
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002383- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2384 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2385 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2386 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2387 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2388
2389 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2390 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2391 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2392 pattern.
2393
2394 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2395 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2396 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2397 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2398
2399 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2400 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2401 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2402 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2403 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2404 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2405
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002406- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2407 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2408 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2409 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2410 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2411 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2412 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2413 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002414
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002415- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2416 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2417 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2418 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2419 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002420 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2421 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2422 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2423 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2424 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2425 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2426 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002427
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002428- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2429 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2430
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002431- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2432 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2433 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2434 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2435 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2436 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2437 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2438 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2439 to Zack Weinberg!
2440
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002441- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2442 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2443 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2444 type. This has been fixed now.
2445
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002446- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2447 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2448 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2449
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002450- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2451 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2452 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2453 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2454 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2455 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2456 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2457 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002458 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002459
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002460- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2461 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2462 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002463
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002464- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2465 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2466 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2467 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2468 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2469 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2470 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2471 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002472 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002473 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2474 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2475
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002476- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2477 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2478 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2479 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2480 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2481 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2482 this.)
2483
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002484- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2485 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002486 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002487 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002488 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2489 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002490 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2491 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002492
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002493- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2494 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2495 currently running.
2496
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002497- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2498 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2499 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2500 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2501
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002502- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2503 as directory names.
2504
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002505- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2506 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2507
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002508- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2509 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2510
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002511- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002512 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2513 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002514
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002515- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2516 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2517 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2518 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2519 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2520
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002521- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2522 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2523 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2524 removed.
2525
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002526- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2527 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2528 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2529
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002530- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2531 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2532 to __debug__.
2533
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002534- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2535 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2536 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2537
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002538- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2539 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2540 deprecated now.
2541
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002542- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2543 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2544 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002545
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002546- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2547 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2548 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2549 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2550 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002551
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002552- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2553 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2554
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002555- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2556 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2557 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002558 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002559 is backward compatible.
2560
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002561- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2562 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2563 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2564 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2565 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2566
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002567- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2568 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2569 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2570 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2571 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2572 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002573
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002574- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2575 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2576
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002577- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2578 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2579
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002580- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2581 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2582 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2583 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2584 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2585
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002586- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2587 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2588 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2589
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002590- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002591 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2592
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002593- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2594 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2595 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002596
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002597- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2598 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2599
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002600- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2601 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2602 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2603
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002604- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2605
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002606Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002607-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002608
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002609- Added three operators to the operator module:
2610 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2611 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2612 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2613
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002614- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2615
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002616- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2617 archives.
2618
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002619- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2620 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2621 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2622
2623 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2624
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002625- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2626 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2627 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002628 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002629
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002630- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2631 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2632 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2633 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002634 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2635 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2636 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2637 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002638
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002639- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2640 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002641
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002642- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2643
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002644- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2645 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2646
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002647- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2648 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2649 supported.
2650
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002651- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2652
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002653- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2654 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002655
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002656- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2657 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2658
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002659- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2660
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002661- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2662 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2663
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002664- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2665 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2666 functions but callable type objects.
2667
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002668- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002669 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002670 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002671
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002672- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2673 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002674
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002675- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2676 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002677
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002678- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2679 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2680 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2681 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2682
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002683- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2684 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002685
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002686- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2687 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2688 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2689 and __imul__.
2690
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002691- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002692 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2693 is called.
2694
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002695- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2696 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2697 interpreter was compiled.
2698
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002699- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2700 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2701 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002702 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002703 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2704 1, not 2.
2705
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002706- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2707 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2708 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2709 limit.
2710
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002711- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2712 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2713 bug #623464.
2714
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002715- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2716 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2717 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2718 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2719
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002720Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002722
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002723- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2724
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002725- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2726 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2727 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2728 with Python 2.3a2.
2729
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002730- os.path exposes getctime.
2731
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002732- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002733 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002734 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002735 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002736 unit tests of floating point results.
2737
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002738- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2739 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2740 has been increased.
2741
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002742- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2743 executed.
2744
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002745- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2746 postinstallation script.
2747
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002748- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2749 test the current module.
2750
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002751- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002752 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2753 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2754 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2755 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2756
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002757- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002758 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002759 Ward's Optik package.
2760
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002761- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2762 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2763 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2764 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2765
2766- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2767 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002768 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002769
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002770- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2771 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2772 shelf are binary pickles.
2773
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002774- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2775 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2776
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002777- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2778 modules are iterators now.
2779
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002780- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2781 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2782 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2783 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2784 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2785 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002786
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002787- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2788 with their entity value.
2789
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002790- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2791
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002792- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2793 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002794
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002795- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2796 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002797 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002798
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002799- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2800 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2801 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2802 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2803 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2804 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2805 main():
2806
2807 import locale
2808 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2809
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002810- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2811 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2812
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002813- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2814 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2815 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2816 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2817 to the new standard.
2818
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002819- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2820 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2821 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2822 an extension to the database.
2823
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002824- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2825 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2826 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2827 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002828 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002829
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002830- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002831 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002832
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002833- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2834 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2835 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2836 bounded integers.
2837
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002838- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2839 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2840 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2841 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2842 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2843 in existence.
2844
2845 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2846 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2847 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2848 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2849 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2850 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2851
2852 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2853 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2854 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2855 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2856
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002857- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2858 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2859 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2860
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002861- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2862
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002863- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2864 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2865 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2866 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2867
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002868- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2869 argument.
2870
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002871- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2872 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2873 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2874 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2875 [SF patch 560794].
2876
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002877- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2878 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2879 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002880 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2881 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2882 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002883
2884- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2885 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002886
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002887- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2888 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2889 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2890 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002891
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002892- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2893 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2894 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2895 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2896 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2897
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002898- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002899
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002900- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2901
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002902- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2903 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2904 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2905 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2906 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2907 identical to None.
2908
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002909- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2910 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2911 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2912 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2913 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2914 results now.
2915
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002916- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2917 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2918
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002919- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2920 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2921 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2922 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2923 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2924 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2925 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2926 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2927
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002928- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2929
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002930- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2931 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2932
2933- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2934 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2935 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2936 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2937 and other systems.
2938
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002939- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2940 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2941 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2942 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 +00002943 work well with these.
2944
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002945- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2946
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002947- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002948 connections.
2949
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002950- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2951 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2952 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2953
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002954- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2955 sets
2956
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002957- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2958 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2959 name.
2960
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002961- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2962 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2963 passed in.
2964
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002965- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002966 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002967 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2968 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002969
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002970- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2971
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002972- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2973
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002974- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2975 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2976 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2977
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002978- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2979 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2980 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2981 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002982 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002983
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002984- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002985 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002986 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002987
2988- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2989 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2990 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2991
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002992- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002993 the value of its expression argument.
2994
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002995- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2996 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2997 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2998
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002999- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3000 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3001 skipstone browser was included.
3002
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003003- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3004 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3005
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003006Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003008
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003009- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3010 names in addition to accepting file names.
3011
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003012- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3013 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3014 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3015 still used and useful.)
3016
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003017- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3018 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3019 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3020 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003021
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003022- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3023 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3024 the generated binary.
3025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003026Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003028
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003029- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3030
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003031- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3032 except in the hands of experts.
3033
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003034- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003035 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3036 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3037 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003038
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003039- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3040 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3041 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3042 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3043 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3044 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3045 builds.
3046
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003047- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3048 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3049 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3050 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3051 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3052 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3053 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3054 new type.
3055
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003056- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003057
3058 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3059 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3060 positive infinities.
3061
3062 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3063 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3064 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3065 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3066 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3067 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3068 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3069
3070 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3071
3072 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3073
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003074- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3075 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3076 size of the executable.
3077
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003078- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3079 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3080 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3081 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003082
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003083- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3084
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003085- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3086 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3087 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003088
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003089- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3090 well as Unix.
3091
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003092- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3093 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3094 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3095 modules in the README file for details.
3096
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003097C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003098-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003099
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003100- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3101 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003102 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003103 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003104 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003105
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003106- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3107 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3108 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3109 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3110 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3111 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003112 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003113 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3114 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3115 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3116 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3117 aligned.)
3118
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003119- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3120 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3121 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3122
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003123- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3124 level.
3125
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003126- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3127 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3128 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3129 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3130 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3131
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003132- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3133 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3134 code.
3135
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003136- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3137 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3138 adjusting for negative indices.
3139
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003140- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3141 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3142 object.
3143
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003144- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3145 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3146 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3147
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003148- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3149 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003150
3151- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3152
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003153- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3154 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3155 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3156 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3157
3158- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3159
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003160- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003161
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003162- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003163 without going through the buffer API.
3164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003166
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003167- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3168 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3169 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3170 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3171
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003172- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3173 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3174
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003175- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003176 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3177
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003178New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003179-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003180
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003181- OpenVMS is now supported.
3182
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003183- AtheOS is now supported.
3184
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003185- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3186
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003187- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003189Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190-----
3191
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003192- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3193 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3194 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003195
3196Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003198
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003199- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3200 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3201 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3202 bugs.
3203 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003204 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003205 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3206 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003207 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003208
3209- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003210 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003211
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003212- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3213 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3214
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003215- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3216 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003217 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003218 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3219
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003220- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3221 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3222 use files" uninstall option).
3223
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003224- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3225
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003226- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3227 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3228
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003229- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3230 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3231 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3232
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003233- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3234 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3235 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3236 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3237 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003238 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3239 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3240 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003241
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003242- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003243 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003244 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3245 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3246 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3247 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3248 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3249 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3250 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3251 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3252 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3253 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3254 work around.
3255
3256- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3257 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3258 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3259 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3260 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3261 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3262 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3263 specified with O_CREAT too).
3264
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003265Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266----
3267
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003268- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003269
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003270- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3271 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3272 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3273
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003274- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3275 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3276 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3277
3278- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3279 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3280 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3281 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3282 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3283 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3284 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3285 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003286
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003287- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3288 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3289 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003290
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003291- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3292 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3293 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3294 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3295 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003296
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003297- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3298 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3299 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003300
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003301- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3302 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003303
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003304- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3305 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3306 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3307 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3308 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003309
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003310- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3311 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3312 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3313
3314- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3315 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3316 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003317
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003318- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3319 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3320 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3321 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003322 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003323
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003324- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3325 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003326
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003327- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3328 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003329
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003330- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003331 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003332 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3333 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003334
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003335
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003336What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003337===============================
3338
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3340
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003341Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003342--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003343
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003344- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3345 with a custom metaclass.
3346
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003347Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003349
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003350- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3351 are proxies.
3352
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003353Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003355
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003356- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3357 very short strings.
3358
3359- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3360 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3361 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3362 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3363 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3364
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003365Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003367
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003368- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3369 close or delete time).
3370
3371- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3372 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3373
3374- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3375
3376- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003377 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003378
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003379Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003380-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003381
3382Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003384
3385C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003386-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003387
3388New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003389-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003390
3391Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003393
3394Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003396
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003397- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3398
3399- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3400 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3401
3402- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3403 deleted at process exit time.
3404
3405- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3406 in backslash.
3407
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003408Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003410
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003411- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3412 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3413 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3414
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003415
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003416What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003417===========================
3418
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3420
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003421Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003423
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003424- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3425 been extensively updated. See
3426
3427 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3428
3429 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3430
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003431- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3432 deleted!
3433
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003434- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3435 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3436 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3437 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3438 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3439
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003440- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3441
3442 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3443 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3444
3445 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3446 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3447 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3448 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3449 supported anyway.
3450
3451 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3452 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3453
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003454- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3455 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3456 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3457 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3458 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003459
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003460- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3461 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3462 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3463
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003464Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003466
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003467- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3468 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3469 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3470 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3471 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3472 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003473 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3474 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3475 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3476 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003477
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003478- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3479 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3480 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3481
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003482Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003484
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003485- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3486
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003487Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003489
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003490- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3491 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3492 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3493 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3494 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3495 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3496
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003497- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3498
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003499- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3500
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003501- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3502
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003503- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3504 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3505 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3506
3507- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3508
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003509Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003511
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003512- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3513 off a search on Google.
3514
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003515Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003516-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003517
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003518- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3519 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3520 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3521 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3522 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3523 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3524 other platforms should do likewise.
3525
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003526- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3527 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3528 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3529
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003530C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003532
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003533- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3534 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3535 producing key-value pairs.
3536
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003537- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003538 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003539 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3540 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3541 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3542 previously went unchallenged.
3543
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003544New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003546
3547Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003549
3550Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003551-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003552
3553Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003554----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003555
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003556- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3557 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003558
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003559- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3560 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3561 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3562 home.
3563
3564
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003565What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003566===========================
3567
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3569
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003570Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003572
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003573- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3574 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003575
3576 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003577 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003578
3579 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3580 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003581 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003582 This needs to be documented.
3583
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003584- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3585 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3586
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003587- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3588 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3589 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3590
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003591- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3592 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3593
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003594- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3595 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3596 class forbids it).
3597
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003598- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3599 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3600 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3601
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003602- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3603
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003604Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003606
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003607- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3608 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003609 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003610
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003611- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3612 (like 1 + '').
3613
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003614Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003615-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003616
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003617- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3618 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3619 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3620 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003621 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003622 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3623
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003624- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3625 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3626 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3627 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3628
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003629- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3630 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003631 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3632 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3633 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003634
3635- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3636 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003637
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003638- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3639 bytes on its input.
3640
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003641Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003644- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003645 convenience function.
3646
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003647- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3648 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3649 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003650 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3651 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3652 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3653 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3654 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3655 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003656
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003657- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3658 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3659 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3660 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3661
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003662- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3663 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3664 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3665
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003666- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3667 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3668 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3669 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3670
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003671- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3672 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003674 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3675 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3676 new -l and -e options.
3677
3678- statcache is now deprecated.
3679
3680- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3681 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003683 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3684 time properly taken into account.
3685
3686- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3687 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3688 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3689 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3690
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003691Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003692-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003693
3694Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003695-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003696
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003697- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3698 is built with libdb3 if available.
3699
3700- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3701
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003702C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003704
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003705- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3706 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3707 PySequence_Size().
3708
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003709- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3710
3711- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3712 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3713 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3714
3715- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3716 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3717
3718- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3719 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3720
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003721New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003723
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003724- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3725 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3726
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003727- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3728 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3729
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003730- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3731
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003732Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003734
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003735- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3736 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3737
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003738Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003740
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003741Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003743
3744- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3745 removed completely in the next release.
3746
3747- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3748 OSX.
3749
3750- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3751 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3752
3753- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3754
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003755
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003756What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003757===========================
3758
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3760
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003761Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003763
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003764- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003765 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003766 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003767 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3768 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003769 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3770 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003771 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3772 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003773
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003774- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3775 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3776
3777- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3778 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3779
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003780Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003781-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003782
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003783- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3784 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3785 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3786 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3787 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3788 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3789 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3790 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3791
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003792- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3793 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3794 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3795 example).
3796
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003797- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003798 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003799 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003800 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003801
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003802- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3803 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3804 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003805 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003806
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003807- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3808 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3809 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3810 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3811 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3812 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3813
3814 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3815
3816 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3817
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003818Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003820
3821- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3822
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003823- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3824
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003825- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3826 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003827
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003828- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3829 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3830 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3831 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3832 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3833 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003834 attributes.
3835
3836- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3837 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3838 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003839
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003840- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3841 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3842 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003843
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003844- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3845 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3846 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003847 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3848 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3849
3850- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3851 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003852
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003853Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003855
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003856- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3857 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3858
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003859- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3860 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3861 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3862 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3863
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003864- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3865 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3866 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3867 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3868
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003869 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3870 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3871 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3872 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3873 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3874 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3875 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3876 without losing information).
3877
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003878- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003879 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3880 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3881 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3882 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3883 module).
3884
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003885 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003886 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3887 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3888 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3889 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003890
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003891- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003892 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3893 encoding.
3894
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003895- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3896 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3897
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003899 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3900
3901- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3902 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3903 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3904 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3905
3906- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3907
3908- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3909 ON, and OFF.
3910
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003911- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3912 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3913
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003914Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003916
3917- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3918 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3919 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003920
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003921- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3922 been added: -X and -E.
3923
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003924Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003926
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003927- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3928 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3929
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003930C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003932
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003933- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3934 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3935 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3936 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3937 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3938
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003939- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3940 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3941 as long) arguments.
3942
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003943- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3944 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3945 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3946 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3947 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3948 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3949
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003950- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3951 input.
3952
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003953New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003955
3956Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003958
3959Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003961
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003962- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3963 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3964 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3965
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003966- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3967 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3968 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003969 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003970
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3972 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3973 import signal
3974 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003975
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003977 while 1:
3978 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003979 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003980 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3981 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3982 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3983 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003984
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003985
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003986What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3987===========================
3988
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003989*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3990
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003991Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003993
3994- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3995 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3996 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3997
3998- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3999 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4000 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4001 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4002 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4003 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4004 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004005
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004006- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004007 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004008 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4009 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4010 associate a docstring with a property.
4011
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004012- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4013 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4014 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4015 other built-in object types.
4016
4017- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4018 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4019 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4020 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4021 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4022
4023- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4024 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4025
4026- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4027 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004028 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004029 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4030 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4031 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4032 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4033 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4034
4035- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4036 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4037 class.
4038
4039- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4040 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4041 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4042 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4043
4044- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4045 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4046 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4047 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4048
4049- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4050 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4051
4052- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4053 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4054 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4055 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4056 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004057 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004058 with the same value as s.
4059
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004060- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4061
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004062Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004064
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004065- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4066
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004067- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4068 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4069 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4070 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4071 objects.
4072
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004073- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4074 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004075 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4076 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4077
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004078- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4079 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4080 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4081
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004082Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004084
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004085- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4086 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4087 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4088 by the instances.
4089
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004090- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4091 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4092 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4093
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004094- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4095 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4096 before the entire comparison is complete.
4097
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004098- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4099 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4100 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4101
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004102- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4103 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4104 getwriter().
4105
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004106- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4107 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4108
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004109- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004110 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4111 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4112
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004113- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4114 iterable object.
4115
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004116- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4117 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004118
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004119- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4120 authentication.
4121
4122- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4123 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004124
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004125- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004126 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4127 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4128 a sample driver.)
4129
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004130Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004131-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004132
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004133- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4134 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4135 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4136 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4137 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4138 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4139 kernel has large file support.
4140
4141- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4142 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4143 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4144 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4145 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4146
4147- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4148 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4149 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4150
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004151C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004153
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004154- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4155 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4156
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004157New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004159
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004160- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4161 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4162
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004163Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004165
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004166- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4167 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4168 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4169 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4170 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4171
4172- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4173 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4174 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4175 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4176
4177- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4178 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4179
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004180Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004182
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004183- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004184 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4185 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004186
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004187
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004188What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4189===========================
4190
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4192
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004193Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004195
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004196- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4197 big to represent as a C double.
4198
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004199- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4200 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4201 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4202 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4203 restriction).
4204
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004205- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4206 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4207 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4208 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4209 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4210
4211 >>> dir([])
4212 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4213 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4214 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4215 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4216 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4217 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4218 'reverse', 'sort']
4219
4220 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4221
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004222- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004223 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4224 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4225 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4226 OverflowError exception.
4227
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004228- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004229 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004230 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4231 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4232 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4233 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4234 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004235 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4237 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4238
4239 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4240 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4241 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4242 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004243
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004244- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004245 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4246 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4247 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4248 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4249 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4250 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4251 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4252 once it is created.
4253
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004254- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4255 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4256 (key, value) pairs.
4257
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004258- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004259 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4260 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4261
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004262- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4263 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4264 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4265 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4266 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004267
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004268- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004269 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4270 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4271
4272 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004274- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004275 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4276
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004277Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004279
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004280- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004281 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4282 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004283
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004284- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4285 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4286 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4287 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4288 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4289 in this area anymore).
4290
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004291- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4292 threading.Timer.
4293
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004294- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4295 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4296
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004297- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004298 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4299
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004300- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004301 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4302 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4303 converted to Python longs.
4304
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004305- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004306 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4307
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004308- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4309 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4310 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4311
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004312Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004314
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004315- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4316 division operators as per PEP 238.
4317
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004318Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004320
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004321- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4322 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4323 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4324 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4325
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004326C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004328
4329- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004330
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004331- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4332 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004333 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004334
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4336 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004337 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004339
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004340- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004341 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4342 module:
4343
4344 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004345
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004346 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4347 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004348
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004349 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4350 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004351
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004352 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4353
4354 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4355
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004356- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004357 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4358 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4359 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004360
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004361New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004363
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004364- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4365 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4366 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4367 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4368 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004369
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004370Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004372
4373Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004375
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004376- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4377 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4378 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4379 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004380 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4381 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4382 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4383 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4384 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004385
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004386- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004387 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4388
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004389
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004390What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4391===========================
4392
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004393*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4394
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004395Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004397
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004398- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4399 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4400
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004401- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4402 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4403 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004404
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004405- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4406 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4407 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4408 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004409
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004410- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4411
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004413
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004414Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004416
4417- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004418 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004419 the module docstring for details.
4420
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004421Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004423
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004424- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004425 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4426 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4427 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004428
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004429- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4430 Nick Mathewson.
4431
4432Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004434
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004435- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4436 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4437 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4438 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4439 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4440 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4441 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4442 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4443
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004444- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4445 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4446 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4447 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4448
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004449- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4450 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4451 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4452 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4453 come a long way).
4454
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004455- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4456 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4457 write filters for these warnings).
4458
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004459- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4460 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4461 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4462 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4463 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4464
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004465- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4466 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4467 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4468 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4469 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4470 older distribution.
4471
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004472Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004474
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004475- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4476 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004477 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004478
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004479- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4480 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4481 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4482
4483- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4484
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004485- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4486
4487- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4488
4489- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4490
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004492
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004493- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4494
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004495New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004497
4498C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004500
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004501- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4502 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4503 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4504 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4505 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4506 against buffer overruns.
4507
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004508- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004509 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4510 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004511 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4512 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4513 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4514
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004515- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4516 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4517 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4518 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4519 deprecated.
4520
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004521Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004523
4524- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4525 relevant is found.
4526
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004527
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004528What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004529===========================
4530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4532
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004533Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004535
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004536- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4537 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4538 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4539 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4540 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4541 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4542 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4543 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004544 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004545 repaired.
4546
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004547- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004548 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004549 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4550 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4551 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4552 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4553 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4554 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4555 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4556 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4557
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004558- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4559 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4560 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4561 leading BMO character).
4562
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004563- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4564 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4565 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4566
4567 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4568 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4569 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004570
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004571 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4572 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4573 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4574 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4575 for various simple to use conversions.
4576
4577 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4578 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004580 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4581 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4582 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4583 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4584 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4585 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4586 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4587 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4588 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4589 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4590 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4591 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4592 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4593 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4594 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004595
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004596- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4597 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4598 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004599 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004600 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004601
4602 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004603 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4604 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4605 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4606 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4607 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004608 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4609 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004610
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004611 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4612 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4613 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004614 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004615
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004616- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4617 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4618 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4619 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4620 floating arithmetic,
4621
4622 x = 9007199254740992.0
4623 print long(x)
4624
4625 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4626 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4627 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4628 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4629 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4630 functions are of good quality).
4631
4632 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4633 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4634 algorithms to break.
4635
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004636- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4637 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4638 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4639 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4640 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4641 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4642 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4643 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4644 order.
4645
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004646- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4647 operation along the most common code paths.
4648
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004649- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4650 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4651
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004652- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4653 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4654 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4655 {}.update(UserDict())
4656
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004657- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4658 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4659 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4660 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4661 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4662 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4663 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4664 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4665
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004666- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004667 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004669 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004670 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4671 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004672 join() method of strings
4673 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004674 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4675 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004677 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004678
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004679- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4680 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4681
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004682- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4683 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4684
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004685- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4686 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4687 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4688 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4689
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004690- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4691 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004692 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004693 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4694 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004695
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004696- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4697
4698
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004699Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004701
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004702- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004703 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004704 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4705 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4706
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004707- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4708 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4709
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004710- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4711 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4712 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4713 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4714
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004715- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4716 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4717 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4718
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004719- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4720
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004721- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4722
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004723- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4724 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4725 that are still imported into string.py).
4726
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004727- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4728
4729- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4730 Now it does.
4731
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004732- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4733
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004734- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4735 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4736 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4737 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4738 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004739 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4740 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004741
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004742- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4743 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4744 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4745 'help(object)'.
4746
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004747Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004748-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004749
4750- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004751 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004752 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4753 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4754
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004755- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004756 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4757 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004758
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004759C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004761
4762- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4763 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004764
4765----
4766
4767**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**