blob: 89303ba9f8ddbc86f587b062224cd5654a70c5eb [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00008=================================
9
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000010*XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
11
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000013--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000014
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +000015- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
16
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000017- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
18 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000019 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000020 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000021 a different meaning than before.
22
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +000023- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
24 integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
25 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000026
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +000027- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000028 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000029 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000030
31- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
32 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
33 and deallocation.
34
35- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
36 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
37
38- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
39 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
40 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
41 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
42 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
43
44- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
45 now detected by the garbage collector.
46
47- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
48 [SF bug 519621]
49
50- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
51 identifier.
52
53- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
54 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
55 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
56 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
57 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
58 [SF bug 563060]
59
60- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
61 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
62 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
63 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
64 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
65
66- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
67 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
68 not called. [SF bug #537450]
69
70- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
71
72- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
73 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
74 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
75 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
76 state of the slots would be lost.)
77
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000078Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000079-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000080
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +000081- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
82 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
83 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
84 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
85 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
86 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
87 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
88 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
89 releases or implementations.
90
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000091- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +000092 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
93 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000094
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +000095- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
96 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
97
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +000098- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
99 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
100 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
101
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000102- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
103 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
104
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000105- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
106 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
107 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but not kept up
108 to date).
109
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000110- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
111 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
112 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
113 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
114 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
115
116 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
117 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
118 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
119 pattern.
120
121 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
122 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
123 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
124 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
125
126 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
127 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
128 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
129 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
130 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
131 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
132
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000133 - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
134 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
135 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. In
136 addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
Neal Norwitz7165af22002-09-05 21:42:24 +0000137 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
138 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
139 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
140 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000141
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000142- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
143 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
144 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
145 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
146 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000147 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
148 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
149 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
150 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
151 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
152 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
153 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000154
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000155- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
156 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
157
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000158- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
159 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
160 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
161 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
162 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
163 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
164 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
165 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
166 to Zack Weinberg!
167
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000168- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
169 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
170 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
171 type. This has been fixed now.
172
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000173- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
174 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
175 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
176
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000177- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
178 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
179 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
180 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
181 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
182 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
183 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
184 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000185 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000186
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000187- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
188 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
189 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000190
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000191- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
192 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
193 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
194 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
195 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
196 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
197 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
198 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000199 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000200 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
201 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
202
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000203- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
204 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
205 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
206 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
207 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
208 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
209 this.)
210
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000211- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
212 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000213 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000214 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000215 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
216 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000217 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
218 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000219
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000220- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
221 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
222 currently running.
223
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000224- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
225 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
226 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
227 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
228
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000229- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
230 as directory names.
231
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000232- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
233 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
234
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000235- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
236 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
237
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000238- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000239 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
240 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000241
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000242- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
243 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
244 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
245 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
246 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
247
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000248- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
249 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
250 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
251 removed.
252
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000253- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
254 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
255 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
256
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000257- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
258 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
259 to __debug__.
260
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000261- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
262 string to the left with zeros. For example,
263 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
264
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000265- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
266 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
267 deprecated now.
268
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000269- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
270 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
271 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000272
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000273- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
274 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
275
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000276- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
277 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
278 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000279 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000280 is backward compatible.
281
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000282- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
283 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
284 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
285 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
286 could access a pointer to freed memory.
287
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000288- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
289 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
290 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
291 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
292 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
293 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000294
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000295- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
296 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
297
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000298- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
299 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
300
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000301- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
302 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
303 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
304 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
305 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
306
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000307- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
308 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
309 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
310
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000311- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000312 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
313
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000314Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000315-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000316
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000317- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
318 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
319 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000320 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000321
Andrew M. Kuchling50905d02002-11-26 12:31:09 +0000322- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has been
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000323 added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is still
324 available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, and
325 is now named bsddb185.
326
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000327- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
328 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000329
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000330- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
331
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000332- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
333 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
334
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000335- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
336 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
337 supported.
338
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000339- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
340
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000341- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
342 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000343
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000344- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
345 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
346
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000347- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
348
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000349- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
350 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
351
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000352- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
353 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
354 functions but callable type objects.
355
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000356- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000357 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000358 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000359
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000360- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
361 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000362
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000363- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
364 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000365
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000366- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
367 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
368 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
369 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
370
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000371- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
372 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000373
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000374- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
375 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
376 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
377 and __imul__.
378
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000379- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000380 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
381 is called.
382
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000383- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
384 been added where available.
385
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000386- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
387 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
388 interpreter was compiled.
389
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000390- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
391 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
392 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000393 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000394 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
395 1, not 2.
396
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000397- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
398 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
399 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
400 limit.
401
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000402- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
403 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
404 bug #623464.
405
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000406Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000407-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000408
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000409- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
410 test the current module.
411
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000412- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
413 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
414 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
415 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
416 this behavior needs to be controlled.
417
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000418- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000419 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000420 Ward's Optik package.
421
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000422- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
423 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
424 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
425 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
426
427- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
428 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000429 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000430
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000431- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
432 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
433
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000434- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
435 modules are iterators now.
436
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000437- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
438 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
439 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
440 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
441 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
442 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000443
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000444- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
445 with their entity value.
446
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000447- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
448
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000449- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
450 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000451
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000452- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
453 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000454 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000455
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000456- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
457 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
458 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
459 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
460 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
461 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
462 main():
463
464 import locale
465 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
466
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000467- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
468 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
469
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000470- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
471 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
472 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
473 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
474 to the new standard.
475
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000476- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
477 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
478 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
479 an extension to the database.
480
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000481- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
482 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
483 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
484 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
485 is the base class of the two. (This is not documented yet, but
486 help(sets) gives a wealth of information.)
487
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000488- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
489
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000490- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000491 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000492
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000493- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
494 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
495 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
496 bounded integers.
497
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000498- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
499 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
500 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
501
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000502- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
503
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000504- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
505 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
506 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
507 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
508
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000509- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
510 argument.
511
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000512- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
513 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
514 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
515 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
516 [SF patch 560794].
517
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000518- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
519 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
520 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000521 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
522 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
523 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000524
525- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
526 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000527
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000528- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
529 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
530 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
531 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000532
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000533- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
534 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
535 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
536 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
537 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
538
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000539- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000540
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000541- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
542 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
543 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
544 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
545 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
546 identical to None.
547
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000548- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
549 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
550 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
551 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
552 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
553 results now.
554
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000555- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
556 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
557
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000558- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
559 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
560 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
561 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
562 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
563 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
564 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
565 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
566
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000567- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
568
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000569- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
570 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
571
572- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
573 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
574 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
575 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
576 and other systems.
577
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000578- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
579 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
580 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
581 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 +0000582 work well with these.
583
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000584- compileall now supports quiet operation.
585
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000586- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000587 connections.
588
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000589- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
590 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
591 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
592
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000593- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
594 sets
595
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000596- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
597 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
598 name.
599
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000600- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
601 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
602 passed in.
603
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000604- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000605 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000606 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
607 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000608
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000609- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
610
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000611- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
612
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000613- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
614 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
615 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
616
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000617- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
618 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
619 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
620 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
621 honored.
622
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000623- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
624 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
625 running under *nix.
626
627- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
628 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
629 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
630
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000631- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
632 the value of its expression argument.
633
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000634- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
635 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
636 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
637
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000638- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
639 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
640 skipstone browser was included.
641
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000642Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000643-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000644
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000645- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
646 names in addition to accepting file names.
647
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000648- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
649 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
650 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
651 still used and useful.)
652
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000653- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
654 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
655 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
656 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000657
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000658- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
659 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
660 the generated binary.
661
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000662Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000663-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000664
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000665- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
666
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000667- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
668 except in the hands of experts.
669
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000670- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000671 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
672 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
673 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000674
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000675- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
676 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
677 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
678 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
679 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
680 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
681 builds.
682
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000683- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
684 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
685 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
686 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
687 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
688 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
689 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
690 new type.
691
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000692- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000693
694 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
695 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
696 positive infinities.
697
698 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
699 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
700 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
701 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
702 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
703 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
704 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
705
706 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
707
708 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
709
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000710- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
711 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
712 size of the executable.
713
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000714- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
715 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
716 configure script. On other platforms, remove
717 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000718
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000719- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
720
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000721- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
722 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
723 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000724
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000725- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
726 well as Unix.
727
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000728- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
729 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
730 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
731 modules in the README file for details.
732
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000733C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000734-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000735
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000736- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
737 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000738 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000739 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000740 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000741
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000742- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
743 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
744 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
745 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
746 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
747 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
748 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
749 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
750 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
751 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
752 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
753 aligned.)
754
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000755- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
756 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
757 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
758
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000759- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
760 level.
761
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000762- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
763 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
764 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
765 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
766 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
767
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000768- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
769 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
770 code.
771
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000772- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
773 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
774 adjusting for negative indices.
775
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000776- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
777 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
778 object.
779
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000780- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
781 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
782 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
783
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000784- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
785 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000786
787- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
788
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000789- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
790 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
791 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
792 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
793
794- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
795
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000796- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000797
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000798- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000799 without going through the buffer API.
800
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000801- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000802
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000803- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
804 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
805 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
806 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
807
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000808- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
809 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
810
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000811- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000812 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000814New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000815-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000816
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000817- AtheOS is now supported.
818
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000819- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
820
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000821- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
822
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000823Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000824-----
825
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +0000826- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
827 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
828 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000829
830Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000831-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000832
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000833- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
834 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
835 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
836 bugs.
837 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +0000838 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
839 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
840 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000841 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
842
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +0000843- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
844 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
845
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +0000846- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
847 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
848 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
849 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
850
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000851- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
852 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
853 use files" uninstall option).
854
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000855- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
856
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000857- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
858 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
859
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000860- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
861 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
862 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
863
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000864- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
865 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
866 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
867 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
868 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000869 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
870 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
871 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000872
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000873- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000874 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000875 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
876 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
877 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
878 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
879 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
880 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
881 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
882 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
883 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
884 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
885 work around.
886
887- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
888 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
889 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
890 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
891 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
892 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
893 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
894 specified with O_CREAT too).
895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000896Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000897----
898
899Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000900
901
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000902What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000903===============================
904
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000905*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
906
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000907Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000908--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000909
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000910- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
911 with a custom metaclass.
912
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000913Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000914-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000915
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000916- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
917 are proxies.
918
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000919Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000920-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000921
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000922- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
923 very short strings.
924
925- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
926 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
927 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
928 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
929 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
930
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000931Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000932-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000933
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000934- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
935 close or delete time).
936
937- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
938 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
939
940- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
941
942- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000943 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000944
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000945Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000946-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000947
948Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000949-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000950
951C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000952-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000953
954New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000955-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000956
957Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000958-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000959
960Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000961-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000962
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000963- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
964
965- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
966 instances are deleted at process exit time.
967
968- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
969 deleted at process exit time.
970
971- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
972 in backslash.
973
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000974Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000975----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000976
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000977- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
978 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
979 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
980
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000981
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +0000982What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000983===========================
984
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000985*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
986
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000987Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000988--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000989
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000990- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
991 been extensively updated. See
992
993 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
994
995 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
996
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +0000997- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
998 deleted!
999
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001000- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1001 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1002 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1003 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1004 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1005
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001006- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1007
1008 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1009 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1010
1011 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1012 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1013 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1014 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1015 supported anyway.
1016
1017 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1018 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1019
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001020- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1021 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1022 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1023 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1024 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001025
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001026- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1027 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1028 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1029
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001030Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001031-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001032
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001033- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1034 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1035 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1036 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1037 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1038 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001039 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1040 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1041 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1042 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001043
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001044- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1045 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1046 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1047
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001048Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001049-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001050
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001051- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1052
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001053Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001054-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001055
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001056- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1057 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1058 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1059 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1060 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1061 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1062
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001063- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1064
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001065- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1066
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001067- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1068
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001069- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1070 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1071 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1072
1073- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1074
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001075Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001076-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001077
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001078- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1079 off a search on Google.
1080
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001081Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001082-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001083
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001084- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1085 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1086 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1087 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1088 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1089 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1090 other platforms should do likewise.
1091
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001092- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1093 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1094 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1095
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001096C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001097-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001098
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001099- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1100 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1101 producing key-value pairs.
1102
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001103- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001104 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001105 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1106 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1107 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1108 previously went unchallenged.
1109
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001110New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001111-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001112
1113Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001114-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001115
1116Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001117-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001118
1119Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001120----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001121
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001122- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1123 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001124
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001125- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1126 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1127 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1128 home.
1129
1130
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001131What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001132===========================
1133
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001134*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1135
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001136Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001137--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001138
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001139- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1140 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001141
1142 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001143 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001144
1145 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1146 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001147 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001148 This needs to be documented.
1149
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001150- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1151 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1152
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001153- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1154 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1155 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1156
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001157- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1158 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1159
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001160- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1161 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1162 class forbids it).
1163
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001164- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1165 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1166 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1167
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001168- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1169
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001170Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001171-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001172
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001173- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1174 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001175 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001176
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001177- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1178 (like 1 + '').
1179
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001180Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001181-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001182
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001183- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1184 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1185 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1186 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001187 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001188 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1189
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001190- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1191 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1192 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1193 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1194
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001195- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1196 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001197 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1198 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1199 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001200
1201- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1202 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001203
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001204- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1205 bytes on its input.
1206
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001207Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001208-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001209
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001210- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001211 convenience function.
1212
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001213- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1214 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1215 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001216 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1217 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1218 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1219 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1220 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1221 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001222
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001223- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1224 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1225 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1226 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1227
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001228- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1229 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1230 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1231
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001232- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1233 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1234 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1235 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1236
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001237- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1238 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001239 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001240 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1241 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1242 new -l and -e options.
1243
1244- statcache is now deprecated.
1245
1246- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1247 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001248 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001249 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1250 time properly taken into account.
1251
1252- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1253 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1254 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1255 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1256
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001257Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001258-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001259
1260Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001261-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001262
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001263- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1264 is built with libdb3 if available.
1265
1266- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1267
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001268C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001269-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001270
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001271- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1272 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1273 PySequence_Size().
1274
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001275- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1276
1277- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1278 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1279 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1280
1281- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1282 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1283
1284- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1285 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1286
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001287New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001288-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001289
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001290- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1291 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1292
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001293- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1294 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1295
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001296- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1297
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001298Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001299-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001300
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001301- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1302 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1303
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001304Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001305-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001306
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001307Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001308----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001309
1310- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1311 removed completely in the next release.
1312
1313- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1314 OSX.
1315
1316- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1317 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1318
1319- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1320
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001321
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001322What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001323===========================
1324
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001325*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1326
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001327Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001328--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001329
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001330- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001331 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001332 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001333 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1334 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001335 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1336 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001337 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1338 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001339
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001340- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1341 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1342
1343- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1344 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1345
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001346Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001347-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001348
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001349- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1350 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1351 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1352 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1353 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1354 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1355 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1356 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1357
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001358- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1359 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1360 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1361 example).
1362
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001363- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001364 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001365 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001366 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001367
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001368- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1369 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1370 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001371 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001372
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001373- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1374 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1375 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1376 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1377 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1378 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1379
1380 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1381
1382 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1383
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001384Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001385-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001386
1387- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1388
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001389- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1390
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001391- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1392 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001393
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001394- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1395 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1396 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1397 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1398 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1399 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001400 attributes.
1401
1402- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1403 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1404 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001405
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001406- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1407 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1408 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001409
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001410- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1411 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1412 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001413 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1414 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1415
1416- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1417 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001418
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001419Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001420-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001421
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001422- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1423 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1424
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001425- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1426 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1427 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1428 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1429
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001430- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1431 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1432 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1433 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1434
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001435 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1436 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1437 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1438 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1439 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1440 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1441 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1442 without losing information).
1443
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001444- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001445 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1446 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1447 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1448 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1449 module).
1450
1451 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1452 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1453 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1454 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1455 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001456
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001457- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001458 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1459 encoding.
1460
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001461- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1462 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1463
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001464- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001465 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1466
1467- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1468 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1469 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1470 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1471
1472- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1473
1474- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1475 ON, and OFF.
1476
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001477- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1478 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1479
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001480Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001481-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001482
1483- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1484 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1485 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001486
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001487- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1488 been added: -X and -E.
1489
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001490Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001491-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001492
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001493- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1494 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1495
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001496C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001497-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001498
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001499- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1500 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1501 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1502 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1503 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1504
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001505- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1506 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1507 as long) arguments.
1508
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001509- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1510 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1511 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1512 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1513 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1514 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1515
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001516- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1517 input.
1518
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001519New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001520-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001521
1522Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001523-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001524
1525Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001526-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001527
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001528- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1529 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1530 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1531
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001532- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1533 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1534 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001535 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001536
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001537 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1538 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1539 import signal
1540 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001541
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001542 try:
1543 while 1:
1544 pass
1545 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1546 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1547 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1548 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1549 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001550
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001551
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001552What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1553===========================
1554
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001555*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1556
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001557Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001558--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001559
1560- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1561 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1562 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1563
1564- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1565 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1566 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1567 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1568 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1569 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1570 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001571
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001572- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001573 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001574 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1575 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1576 associate a docstring with a property.
1577
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001578- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1579 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1580 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1581 other built-in object types.
1582
1583- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1584 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1585 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1586 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1587 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1588
1589- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1590 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1591
1592- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1593 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001594 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001595 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1596 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1597 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1598 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1599 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1600
1601- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1602 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1603 class.
1604
1605- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1606 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1607 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1608 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1609
1610- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1611 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1612 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1613 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1614
1615- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1616 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1617
1618- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1619 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1620 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1621 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1622 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001623 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001624 with the same value as s.
1625
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001626- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1627
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001628Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001629----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001630
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001631- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1632
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001633- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1634 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1635 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1636 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1637 objects.
1638
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001639- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1640 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001641 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1642 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1643
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001644- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1645 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1646 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1647
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001648Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001649-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001650
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001651- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1652 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1653 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1654 by the instances.
1655
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001656- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1657 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1658 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1659
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001660- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1661 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1662 before the entire comparison is complete.
1663
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001664- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1665 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1666 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1667
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001668- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1669 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1670 getwriter().
1671
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001672- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1673 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1674
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001675- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001676 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1677 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1678
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001679- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1680 iterable object.
1681
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001682- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1683 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001684
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001685- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1686 authentication.
1687
1688- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1689 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001690
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001691- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001692 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1693 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1694 a sample driver.)
1695
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001696Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001697-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001698
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001699Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001700-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001701
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001702- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1703 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1704 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1705 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1706 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1707 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1708 kernel has large file support.
1709
1710- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1711 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1712 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1713 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1714 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1715
1716- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1717 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1718 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1719
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001720C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001721-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001722
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001723- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1724 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1725
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001726New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001727-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001728
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001729- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1730 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1731
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001732Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001733-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001734
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001735- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1736 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1737 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1738 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1739 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1740
1741- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1742 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1743 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1744 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1745
1746- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1747 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1748
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001749Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001750-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001751
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001752- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001753 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1754 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001755
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001756
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001757What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1758===========================
1759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001760*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1761
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001762Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001763----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001764
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001765- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1766 big to represent as a C double.
1767
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001768- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1769 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1770 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1771 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1772 restriction).
1773
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001774- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1775 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1776 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1777 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1778 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1779
1780 >>> dir([])
1781 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1782 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1783 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1784 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1785 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1786 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1787 'reverse', 'sort']
1788
1789 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1790
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001791- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001792 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1793 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1794 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1795 OverflowError exception.
1796
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001797- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001798 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001799 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1800 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1801 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1802 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1803 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001804 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001805 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
1806 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
1807
1808 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1809 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1810 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1811 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001812
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001813- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001814 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1815 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1816 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1817 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1818 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1819 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1820 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1821 once it is created.
1822
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001823- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1824 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1825 (key, value) pairs.
1826
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001827- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001828 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1829 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1830
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001831- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1832 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1833 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1834 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1835 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001836
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001837- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001838 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1839 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1840
1841 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1842
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001843- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001844 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1845
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001846Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001847-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001848
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001849- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00001850 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
1851 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001852
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001853- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1854 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1855 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1856 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1857 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1858 in this area anymore).
1859
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001860- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1861 threading.Timer.
1862
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001863- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1864 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1865
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001866- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001867 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1868
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001869- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001870 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1871 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1872 converted to Python longs.
1873
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001874- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001875 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1876
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001877- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1878 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1879 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1880
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001881Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001882-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001883
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001884- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1885 division operators as per PEP 238.
1886
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001887Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001888-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001889
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001890- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1891 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1892 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1893 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1894
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001895C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001896-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001897
1898- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001899
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001900- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1901 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001902 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001903
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001904 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1905 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1906 /* The conversion failed. */
1907 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001909- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001910 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1911 module:
1912
1913 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001914
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001915 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1916 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001917
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001918 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1919 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001920
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001921 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1922
1923 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1924
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001925- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001926 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1927 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1928 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001929
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001930New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001931-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001932
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001933- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1934 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1935 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1936 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1937 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001938
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001939Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001940-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001941
1942Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001943-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001944
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001945- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1946 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1947 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1948 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001949 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1950 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1951 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1952 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1953 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001954
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001955- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001956 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1957
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001958
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001959What's New in Python 2.2a2?
1960===========================
1961
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001962*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
1963
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001964Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001965-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001966
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001967- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1968 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1969
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001970- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1971 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
1972 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001973
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00001974- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
1975 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
1976 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
1977 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001978
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001979- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
1980
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001981- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001982
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001983Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001984-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001985
1986- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00001987 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001988 the module docstring for details.
1989
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001990Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001991-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001992
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001993- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001994 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
1995 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
1996 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001997
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001998- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
1999 Nick Mathewson.
2000
2001Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002002----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002003
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002004- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2005 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2006 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2007 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2008 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2009 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2010 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2011 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2012
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002013- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2014 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2015 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2016 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2017
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002018- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2019 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2020 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2021 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2022 come a long way).
2023
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002024- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2025 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2026 write filters for these warnings).
2027
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002028- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2029 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2030 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2031 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2032 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2033
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002034- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2035 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2036 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2037 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2038 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2039 older distribution.
2040
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002041Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002042-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002043
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002044- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2045 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002046 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002047
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002048- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2049 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2050 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2051
2052- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2053
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002054- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2055
2056- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2057
2058- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2059
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002060- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002061
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002062- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2063
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002064New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002065-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002066
2067C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002068-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002069
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002070- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2071 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2072 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2073 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2074 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2075 against buffer overruns.
2076
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002077- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002078 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2079 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002080 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2081 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2082 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2083
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002084- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2085 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2086 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2087 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2088 deprecated.
2089
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002090Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002091-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002092
2093- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2094 relevant is found.
2095
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002096
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002097What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002098===========================
2099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002100*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2101
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002102Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002103----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002104
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002105- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2106 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2107 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2108 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2109 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2110 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2111 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2112 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002113 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002114 repaired.
2115
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002116- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002117 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002118 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2119 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2120 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2121 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2122 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2123 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2124 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2125 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2126
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002127- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2128 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2129 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2130 leading BMO character).
2131
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002132- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2133 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2134 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2135
2136 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2137 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2138 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002139
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002140 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2141 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2142 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2143 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2144 for various simple to use conversions.
2145
2146 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2147 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2148
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2150 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2151 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2152 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2153 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2154 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2155 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2156 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2157 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2158 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2159 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2160 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2161 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2162 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2163 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002164
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002165- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2166 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2167 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002168 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002169 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002170
2171 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002172 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2173 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2174 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2175 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2176 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002177 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2178 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002179
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002180 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2181 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2182 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002183 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002184
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002185- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2186 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2187 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2188 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2189 floating arithmetic,
2190
2191 x = 9007199254740992.0
2192 print long(x)
2193
2194 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2195 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2196 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2197 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2198 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2199 functions are of good quality).
2200
2201 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2202 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2203 algorithms to break.
2204
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002205- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2206 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2207 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2208 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2209 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2210 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2211 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2212 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2213 order.
2214
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002215- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2216 operation along the most common code paths.
2217
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002218- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2219 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2220
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002221- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2222 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2223 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2224 {}.update(UserDict())
2225
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002226- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2227 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2228 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2229 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2230 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2231 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2232 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2233 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2234
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002235- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002236 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002237
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002238 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002239 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2240 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002241 join() method of strings
2242 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002243 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2244 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002245 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002246 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002247
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002248- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2249 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2250
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002251- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2252 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2253
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002254- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2255 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2256 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2257 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2258
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002259- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2260 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002261 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002262 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2263 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002264
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002265- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2266
2267
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002268Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002269-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002270
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002271- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002272 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002273 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2274 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2275
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002276- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2277 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2278
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002279- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2280 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2281 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2282 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2283
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002284- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2285 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2286 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2287
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002288- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2289
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002290- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2291
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002292- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2293 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2294 that are still imported into string.py).
2295
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002296- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2297
2298- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2299 Now it does.
2300
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002301- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2302
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002303- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2304 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2305 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2306 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2307 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002308 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2309 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002310
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002311- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2312 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2313 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2314 'help(object)'.
2315
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002316Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002317-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002318
2319- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002320 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002321 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2322 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2323
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002324- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002325 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2326 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002327
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002328C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002329-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002330
2331- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2332 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002333
2334----
2335
2336**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**