blob: 35b35b87fd576ed963c39675fbd18b7ffcd627f2 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +000015- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
16 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
17 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
18 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
19 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
20 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
21 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
22 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
23 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
24 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
25 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
26 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
27 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +000028
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +000029- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
30 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
31 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
32 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
33 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
34
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000035- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
36 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
37
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000038- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
39 It's writable again.
40
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000041- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
42 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
43 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
44 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
45
Neil Schemenauer4e3363e2003-06-09 18:42:19 +000046- Creating an attribute on a module (i.e. a global variable created by
47 __setattr__) that causes a builtin name to be shadowed now raises a
48 DeprecationWarning. In future versions of Python the effect may be
49 undefined (in order to allow for optimization of global and builtin
50 name lookups).
51
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000052Extension modules
53-----------------
54
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +000055- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
56 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
57
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +000058- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
59 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +000060
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000061- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
62
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000063- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
64 Fixes SF bug #730685.
65
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000066- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
67 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
68 for many BSD-derived systems.
69
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000070Library
71-------
72
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +000073- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
74
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +000075- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
76 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
77 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
78 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
79
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +000080- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
81 handling.
82
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +000083- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
84 __doc__ of data descriptors.
85
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +000086- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
87 in socket.py.
88
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +000089- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
90
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +000091- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
92 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
93 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
94 opener with proxy support.
95
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000096Tools/Demos
97-----------
98
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +000099- diff.py is a new script for print file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff
100 formats. Provides an alternate command line interface to difflib.py.
101
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000102- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
103 files.
104
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000105Build
106-----
107
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000108- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
109 different root directory.
110
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000111C API
112-----
113
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000114- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
115 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
116 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
117 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
118 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
119 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
120 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
121 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
122 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
123 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
124
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000125New platforms
126-------------
127
128None this time.
129
130Tests
131-----
132
133- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
134 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
135
136Windows
137-------
138
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000139- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
140 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
141 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
142 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
143 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
144 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
145 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
146 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
147 that's what it's for.
148
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000149Mac
150---
151
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000152- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
153 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
154 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
155 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000156
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000157What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
158================================
159
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000160*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000161
162Core and builtins
163-----------------
164
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000165- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
166 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
167
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000168- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
169 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
170 and cannot be strings).
171
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000172- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
173 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
174 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
175 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
176
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000177- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
178 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
179 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
180 Python itself.
181
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000182- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
183 the referenced object, if it has one.
184
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000185- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
186 the thread started at
187 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
188
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000189- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
190 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
191 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
192 placed on a list index.
193
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000194- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
195 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
196 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
197 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
198
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000199- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
200 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
201 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
202 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
203 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
204 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
205 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
206
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000207- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
208 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
209 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
210 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
211 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
212
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000213- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
214 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000215
216- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
217 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
218 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
219 #693195.)
220
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000221- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
222 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000223
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000224- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000225 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000226 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
227 interpreter executions, would fail.
228
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000229- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000230 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000231 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000232
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000233Extension modules
234-----------------
235
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000236- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
237 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
238 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
239 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
240
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000241- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
242 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
243
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000244- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
245 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
246 and Greg Chapman.)
247
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000248- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
249 recursively.
250
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000251- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000252 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
253 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
254 leaks.
255
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000256- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
257
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000258- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
259 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
260 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
261 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
262 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
263 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
264 #705836.
265
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000266- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
267 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
268
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000269- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
270 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
271 See SF bug #692416.
272
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000273- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
274 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
275
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000276- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
277 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
278 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000279
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000280- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000281 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
282 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
283
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000284- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
285 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
286 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
287 timeouts to work properly.
288
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000289Library
290-------
291
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000292- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
293 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
294 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
295 future release.
296
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000297- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
298 for querying platform dependent features.
299
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000300- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000301
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000302- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
303 pickle protocol versions.
304
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000305- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
306 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
307 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
308
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000309- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
310
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000311- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
312 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
313 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
314 modules.
315
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000316- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
317 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
318 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
319
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000320- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
321 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
322
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000323- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
324 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
325 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
326
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000327- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000328 MS Office extensions.
329
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000330- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
331 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
332
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000333- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
334 execution speed of expressions and statements.
335
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000336- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
337 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
338 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
339 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
340 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
341 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
342
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000343- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
344 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
345 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000346
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000347- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
348 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
349 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
350
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000351- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
352
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000353- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
354 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
355 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
356
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000357Tools/Demos
358-----------
359
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000360- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
361 See the module docstring for details.
362
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000363Build
364-----
365
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000366- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
367 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000368
369C API
370-----
371
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000372- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
373
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000374- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
375 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
376 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
377
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000378- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
379 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000380
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000381 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
382 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
383 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000384
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000385- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000386 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
387
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000388- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
389 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
390 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000391
392New platforms
393-------------
394
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000395None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000396
397Tests
398-----
399
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000400- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
401 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000402
403Windows
404-------
405
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000406- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
407 function.
408
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000409- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
410 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000411
412Mac
413---
414
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000415- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
416 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000417
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000418- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
419 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000420
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000421- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
422 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
423 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000424
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000425- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000426 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
427 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000428
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000429- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
430 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000431
432
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000433What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
434=================================
435
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000436*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000437
438Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000439-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000440
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000441- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
442 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
443 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
444
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000445- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
446 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
447 (SF patch #664376.)
448
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000449- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
450 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
451 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
452 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
453 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
454 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000455 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000456
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000457- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
458 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
459 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
460 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000461 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000462
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000463- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
464 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
465 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
466 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
467 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
468 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
469 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
470 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
471 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
472 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
473 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
474
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000475- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
476 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
477 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
478 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
479 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
480 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
481
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000482- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
483 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
484
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000485- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
486 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
487 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
488 case.)
489
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000490- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
491 passed as unicode strings.
492
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000493- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
494 See SF bug #683467.
495
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000496- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
497 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
498
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000499- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
500
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000501- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
502
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000503- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
504 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
505 arguments.
506
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000507- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
508 See SF bug #667147.
509
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000510- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000511 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000512 See SF bug #676155.
513
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000514- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000515 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000516 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
517 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
518 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
519 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
520 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
521 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000522
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000523Extension modules
524-----------------
525
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000526- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
527 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
528 tp_as_number pointer.
529
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000530- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
531 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
532 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
533 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
534 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
535
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000536- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
537
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000538- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
539
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000540- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000541 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000542 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
543 patch #678531.)
544
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000545- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
546 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
547
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000548- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
549 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
550
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000551- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
552
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000553- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
554 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
555 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
556
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000557- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
558
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000559- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
560 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
561
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000562- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000563
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000564- datetime changes:
565
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000566 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
567
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000568 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
569 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
570 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
571 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
572 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
573 now.
574
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000575 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000576 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
577 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000578
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000579 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000580 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000581 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
582 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
583 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
584 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000585
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000586 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
587 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
588 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000589 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
590
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000591 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
592 by a later example coded by Guido.
593
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000594 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000595 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
596 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
597 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000598 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
599 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
600
601 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
602 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
603 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
604 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
605 tzinfo subclass instance.
606
607 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
608 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
609 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
610 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
611 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
612 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
613 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
614 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000615
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000616 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
617 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
618 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
619 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
620 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000621 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
622
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000623 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000624
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000625 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
626 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
627 as a naive datetime object.
628
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000629 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
630 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
631 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
632
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000633 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
634 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
635 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
636 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
637 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
638 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
639 comparison.
640
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000641 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
642 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
643 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
644 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000645 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000646
647 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000648
649 and ::
650
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000651 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
652
653 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
654 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
655 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
656 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
657
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000658 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
659 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
660 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
661 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
662 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
663
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000664 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
665 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000666 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
667 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000668
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000669Library
670-------
671
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000672- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
673 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
674
675- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
676 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
677 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
678 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
679 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
680 See PEP 307 for details.
681
682- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
683 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
684
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000685- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
686 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000687 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000688 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
689 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000690 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000691
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000692- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
693 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
694
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000695- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
696 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
697 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
698
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000699- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
700
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000701- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
702 exception.
703
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000704- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
705 class.
706
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000707- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
708 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
709 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
710
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000711- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
712 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
713
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000714- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000715 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
716 See SF bug #659228.
717
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000718- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
719 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
720 See SF patch #651082.
721
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000722- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000723
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000724- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
725 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
726
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000727- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000728 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000729
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000730- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
731 DOS paths from other platforms.
732
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000733Tools/Demos
734-----------
735
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000736- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
737 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
738 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
739 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
740 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
741 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
742 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
743 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
744 example:
745
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000746 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
747 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000748
749 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
750
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000751
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000752Build
753-----
754
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000755- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
756 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
757 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000758 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
759
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000760 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
761
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000762- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
763 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
764 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
765 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
766 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
767 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
768 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
769 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
770 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
771
772- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
773 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
774 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
775 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
776
777- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
778 from the Tools/scripts directory.
779
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000780C API
781-----
782
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000783- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
784 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000785
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000786- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
787 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
788 tp_as_number pointer.
789
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000790- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
791 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
792 (SF #681367)
793
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000794- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
795 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
796 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
797 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000798
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000799Tests
800-----
801
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000802- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000803 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
804 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
805 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
806 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
807 pydoc.)
808
809- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
810
811- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000812
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000813Windows
814-------
815
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000816- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
817 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
818 time).
819
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000820- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
821 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
822
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000823- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
824 release without strong cryptography.
825
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000826- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000827 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000828
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000829- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
830 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
831
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000832Mac
833---
834
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000835- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
836 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000837
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000838- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
839 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
840 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000841
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000842- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
843 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000844
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000845- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
846 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
847 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
848 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000849
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000850- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000851 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
852 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
853 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000854
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000855
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000856What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000857=================================
858
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000859*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000860
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000861Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000862--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000863
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000864- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
865
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000866- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
867 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000868 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000869 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000870 a different meaning than before.
871
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000872- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000873 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000874 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000875
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000876- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000877 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000878 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000879
880- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
881 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
882 and deallocation.
883
884- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
885 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
886
887- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
888 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
889 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
890 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
891 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
892
893- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
894 now detected by the garbage collector.
895
896- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
897 [SF bug 519621]
898
899- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
900 identifier.
901
902- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
903 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
904 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
905 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
906 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
907 [SF bug 563060]
908
909- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
910 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
911 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
912 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
913 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
914
915- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
916 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
917 not called. [SF bug #537450]
918
919- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
920
921- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
922 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
923 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
924 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
925 state of the slots would be lost.)
926
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000927Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000928-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000929
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000930- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000931 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
932 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
933 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
934 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000935 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
936 Jython 2.1.
937
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000938- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000939 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000940 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
941 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
942 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
943 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
944 these, see PEP 302.
945
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000946- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
947 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
948 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
949
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000950- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
951 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
952 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
953
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000954- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
955 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
956 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
957
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000958- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
959 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
960 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
961 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
962 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
963 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
964 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
965 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
966 releases or implementations.
967
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000968- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000969 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
970 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000971
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000972- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
973 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
974
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000975- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
976 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
977 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
978
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000979- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
980 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
981
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000982- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
983 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000984 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
985 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000986
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000987- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
988 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
989 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
990 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
991 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
992
993 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
994 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
995 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
996 pattern.
997
998 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
999 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1000 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1001 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1002
1003 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1004 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1005 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1006 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1007 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1008 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1009
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001010- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1011 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1012 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1013 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1014 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1015 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1016 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1017 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001018
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001019- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1020 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1021 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1022 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1023 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001024 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1025 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1026 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1027 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1028 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1029 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1030 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001031
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001032- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1033 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1034
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001035- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1036 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1037 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1038 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1039 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1040 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1041 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1042 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1043 to Zack Weinberg!
1044
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001045- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1046 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1047 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1048 type. This has been fixed now.
1049
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001050- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1051 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1052 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1053
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001054- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1055 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1056 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1057 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1058 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1059 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1060 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1061 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001062 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001063
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001064- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1065 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1066 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001067
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001068- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1069 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1070 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1071 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1072 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1073 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1074 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1075 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001076 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001077 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1078 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1079
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001080- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1081 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1082 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1083 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1084 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1085 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1086 this.)
1087
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001088- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1089 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001090 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001091 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001092 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1093 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001094 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1095 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001096
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001097- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1098 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1099 currently running.
1100
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001101- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1102 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1103 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1104 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1105
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001106- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1107 as directory names.
1108
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001109- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1110 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1111
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001112- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1113 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1114
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001115- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001116 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1117 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001118
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001119- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1120 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1121 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1122 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1123 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1124
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001125- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1126 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1127 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1128 removed.
1129
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001130- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1131 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1132 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1133
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001134- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1135 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1136 to __debug__.
1137
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001138- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1139 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1140 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1141
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001142- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1143 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1144 deprecated now.
1145
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001146- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1147 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1148 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001149
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001150- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1151 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1152 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1153 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1154 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001155
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001156- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1157 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1158
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001159- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1160 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1161 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001162 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001163 is backward compatible.
1164
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001165- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1166 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1167 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1168 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1169 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1170
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001171- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1172 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1173 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1174 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1175 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1176 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001177
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001178- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1179 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1180
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001181- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1182 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1183
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001184- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1185 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1186 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1187 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1188 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1189
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001190- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1191 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1192 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1193
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001194- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001195 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1196
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001197- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1198 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1199 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001200
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001201- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1202 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1203
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001204- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1205 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1206 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1207
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001208- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1209
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001210Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001211-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001212
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001213- Added three operators to the operator module:
1214 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1215 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1216 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1217
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001218- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1219
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001220- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1221 archives.
1222
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001223- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1224 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1225 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1226
1227 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1228
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001229- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1230 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1231 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001232 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001233
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001234- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1235 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1236 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1237 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001238 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1239 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1240 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1241 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001242
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001243- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1244 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001245
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001246- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1247
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001248- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1249 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1250
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001251- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1252 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1253 supported.
1254
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001255- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1256
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001257- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1258 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001259
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001260- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1261 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1262
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001263- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1264
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001265- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1266 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1267
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001268- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1269 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1270 functions but callable type objects.
1271
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001272- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001273 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001274 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001275
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001276- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1277 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001278
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001279- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1280 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001281
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001282- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1283 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1284 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1285 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1286
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001287- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1288 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001289
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001290- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1291 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1292 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1293 and __imul__.
1294
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001295- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001296 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1297 is called.
1298
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001299- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1300 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1301 interpreter was compiled.
1302
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001303- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1304 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1305 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001306 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001307 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1308 1, not 2.
1309
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001310- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1311 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1312 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1313 limit.
1314
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001315- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1316 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1317 bug #623464.
1318
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001319- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1320 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1321 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1322 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1323
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001324Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001325-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001326
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001327- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1328
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001329- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1330 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1331 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1332 with Python 2.3a2.
1333
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001334- os.path exposes getctime.
1335
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001336- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001337 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001338 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001339 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001340 unit tests of floating point results.
1341
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001342- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1343 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1344 has been increased.
1345
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001346- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1347 executed.
1348
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001349- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1350 postinstallation script.
1351
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001352- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1353 test the current module.
1354
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001355- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001356 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1357 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1358 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1359 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1360
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001361- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001362 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001363 Ward's Optik package.
1364
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001365- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1366 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1367 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1368 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1369
1370- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1371 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001372 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001373
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001374- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1375 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1376 shelf are binary pickles.
1377
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001378- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1379 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1380
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001381- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1382 modules are iterators now.
1383
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001384- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1385 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1386 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1387 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1388 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1389 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001390
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001391- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1392 with their entity value.
1393
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001394- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1395
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001396- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1397 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001398
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001399- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1400 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001401 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001402
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001403- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1404 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1405 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1406 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1407 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1408 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1409 main():
1410
1411 import locale
1412 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1413
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001414- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1415 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1416
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001417- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1418 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1419 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1420 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1421 to the new standard.
1422
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001423- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1424 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1425 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1426 an extension to the database.
1427
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001428- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1429 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1430 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1431 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001432 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001433
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001434- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001435 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001436
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001437- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1438 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1439 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1440 bounded integers.
1441
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001442- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1443 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1444 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1445 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1446 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1447 in existence.
1448
1449 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1450 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1451 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1452 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1453 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1454 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1455
1456 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1457 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1458 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1459 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1460
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001461- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1462 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1463 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1464
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001465- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1466
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001467- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1468 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1469 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1470 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1471
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001472- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1473 argument.
1474
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001475- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1476 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1477 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1478 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1479 [SF patch 560794].
1480
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001481- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1482 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1483 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001484 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1485 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1486 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001487
1488- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1489 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001490
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001491- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1492 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1493 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1494 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001495
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001496- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1497 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1498 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1499 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1500 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1501
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001502- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001503
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001504- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1505
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001506- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1507 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1508 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1509 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1510 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1511 identical to None.
1512
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001513- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1514 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1515 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1516 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1517 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1518 results now.
1519
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001520- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1521 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1522
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001523- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1524 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1525 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1526 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1527 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1528 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1529 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1530 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1531
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001532- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1533
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001534- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1535 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1536
1537- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1538 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1539 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1540 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1541 and other systems.
1542
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001543- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1544 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1545 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1546 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 +00001547 work well with these.
1548
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001549- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1550
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001551- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001552 connections.
1553
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001554- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1555 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1556 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1557
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001558- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1559 sets
1560
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001561- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1562 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1563 name.
1564
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001565- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1566 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1567 passed in.
1568
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001569- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001570 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001571 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1572 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001573
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001574- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1575
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001576- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1577
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001578- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1579 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1580 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1581
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001582- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1583 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1584 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1585 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001586 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001587
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001588- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001589 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001590 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001591
1592- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1593 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1594 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1595
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001596- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001597 the value of its expression argument.
1598
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001599- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1600 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1601 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1602
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001603- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1604 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1605 skipstone browser was included.
1606
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001607- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1608 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1609
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001610Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001611-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001612
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001613- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1614 names in addition to accepting file names.
1615
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001616- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1617 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1618 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1619 still used and useful.)
1620
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001621- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1622 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1623 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1624 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001625
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001626- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1627 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1628 the generated binary.
1629
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001630Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001631-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001632
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001633- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1634
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001635- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1636 except in the hands of experts.
1637
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001638- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001639 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1640 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1641 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001642
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001643- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1644 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1645 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1646 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1647 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1648 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1649 builds.
1650
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001651- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1652 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1653 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1654 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1655 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1656 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1657 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1658 new type.
1659
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001660- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001661
1662 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1663 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1664 positive infinities.
1665
1666 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1667 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1668 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1669 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1670 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1671 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1672 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1673
1674 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1675
1676 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1677
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001678- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1679 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1680 size of the executable.
1681
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001682- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1683 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1684 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1685 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001686
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001687- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1688
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001689- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1690 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1691 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001692
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001693- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1694 well as Unix.
1695
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001696- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1697 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1698 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1699 modules in the README file for details.
1700
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001701C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001702-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001703
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001704- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1705 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001706 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001707 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001708 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001709
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001710- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1711 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1712 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1713 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1714 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1715 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001716 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001717 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1718 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1719 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1720 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1721 aligned.)
1722
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001723- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1724 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1725 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1726
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001727- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1728 level.
1729
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001730- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1731 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1732 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1733 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1734 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1735
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001736- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1737 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1738 code.
1739
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001740- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1741 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1742 adjusting for negative indices.
1743
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001744- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1745 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1746 object.
1747
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001748- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1749 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1750 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1751
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001752- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1753 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001754
1755- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1756
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001757- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1758 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1759 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1760 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1761
1762- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1763
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001764- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001765
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001766- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001767 without going through the buffer API.
1768
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001769- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001770
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001771- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1772 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1773 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1774 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1775
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001776- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1777 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1778
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001779- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001780 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1781
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001782New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001783-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001784
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001785- OpenVMS is now supported.
1786
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001787- AtheOS is now supported.
1788
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001789- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1790
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001791- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1792
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001793Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001794-----
1795
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001796- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1797 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1798 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001799
1800Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001801-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001802
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001803- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1804 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1805 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1806 bugs.
1807 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001808 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001809 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1810 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001811 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001812
1813- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001814 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001815
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001816- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1817 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1818
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001819- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1820 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001821 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001822 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1823
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001824- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1825 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1826 use files" uninstall option).
1827
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001828- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1829
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001830- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1831 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1832
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001833- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1834 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1835 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1836
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001837- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1838 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1839 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1840 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1841 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001842 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1843 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1844 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001845
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001846- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001847 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001848 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1849 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1850 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1851 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1852 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1853 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1854 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1855 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1856 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1857 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1858 work around.
1859
1860- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1861 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1862 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1863 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1864 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1865 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1866 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1867 specified with O_CREAT too).
1868
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001869Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001870----
1871
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001872- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001873
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001874- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1875 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1876 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1877
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001878- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1879 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1880 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1881
1882- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1883 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1884 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1885 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1886 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1887 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1888 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1889 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001890
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001891- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1892 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1893 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001894
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001895- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1896 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1897 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1898 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1899 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001900
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001901- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1902 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1903 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001905- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1906 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001907
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001908- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1909 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1910 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1911 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1912 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001913
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001914- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1915 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1916 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1917
1918- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1919 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1920 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001922- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1923 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1924 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1925 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001926 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001927
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001928- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1929 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001930
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001931- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1932 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001933
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001934- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001935 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001936 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1937 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001938
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001939
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001940What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001941===============================
1942
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001943*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1944
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001945Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001946--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001947
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001948- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1949 with a custom metaclass.
1950
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001951Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001952-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001953
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001954- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1955 are proxies.
1956
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001957Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001958-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001959
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001960- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1961 very short strings.
1962
1963- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1964 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1965 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1966 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1967 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1968
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001969Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001970-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001971
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001972- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1973 close or delete time).
1974
1975- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1976 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1977
1978- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1979
1980- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001981 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001982
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001983Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001984-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001985
1986Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001987-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001988
1989C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001990-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001991
1992New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001993-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001994
1995Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001996-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001997
1998Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001999-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002000
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002001- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2002
2003- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2004 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2005
2006- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2007 deleted at process exit time.
2008
2009- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2010 in backslash.
2011
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002012Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002013----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002014
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002015- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2016 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2017 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2018
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002019
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002020What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002021===========================
2022
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002023*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2024
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002025Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002026--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002027
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002028- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2029 been extensively updated. See
2030
2031 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2032
2033 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2034
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002035- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2036 deleted!
2037
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002038- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2039 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2040 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2041 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2042 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2043
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002044- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2045
2046 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2047 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2048
2049 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2050 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2051 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2052 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2053 supported anyway.
2054
2055 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2056 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2057
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002058- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2059 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2060 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2061 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2062 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002063
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002064- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2065 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2066 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2067
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002068Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002069-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002070
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002071- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2072 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2073 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2074 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2075 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2076 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002077 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2078 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2079 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2080 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002081
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002082- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2083 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2084 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2085
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002086Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002087-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002088
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002089- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2090
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002091Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002092-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002093
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002094- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2095 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2096 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2097 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2098 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2099 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2100
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002101- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2102
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002103- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2104
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002105- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2106
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002107- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2108 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2109 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2110
2111- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2112
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002113Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002114-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002115
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002116- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2117 off a search on Google.
2118
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002119Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002120-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002121
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002122- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2123 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2124 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2125 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2126 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2127 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2128 other platforms should do likewise.
2129
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002130- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2131 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2132 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2133
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002134C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002135-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002136
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002137- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2138 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2139 producing key-value pairs.
2140
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002141- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002142 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002143 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2144 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2145 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2146 previously went unchallenged.
2147
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002148New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002150
2151Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002152-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002153
2154Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002155-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002156
2157Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002158----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002159
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002160- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2161 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002162
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002163- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2164 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2165 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2166 home.
2167
2168
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002169What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002170===========================
2171
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002172*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2173
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002174Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002175--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002176
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002177- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2178 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002179
2180 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002181 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002182
2183 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2184 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002185 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002186 This needs to be documented.
2187
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002188- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2189 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2190
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002191- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2192 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2193 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2194
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002195- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2196 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2197
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002198- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2199 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2200 class forbids it).
2201
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002202- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2203 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2204 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2205
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002206- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2207
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002208Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002209-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002210
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002211- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2212 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002213 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002214
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002215- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2216 (like 1 + '').
2217
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002218Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002219-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002220
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002221- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2222 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2223 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2224 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002225 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002226 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2227
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002228- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2229 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2230 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2231 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2232
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002233- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2234 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002235 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2236 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2237 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002238
2239- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2240 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002241
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002242- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2243 bytes on its input.
2244
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002245Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002246-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002247
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002248- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002249 convenience function.
2250
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002251- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2252 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2253 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002254 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2255 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2256 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2257 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2258 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2259 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002260
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002261- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2262 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2263 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2264 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2265
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002266- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2267 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2268 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2269
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002270- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2271 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2272 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2273 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2274
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002275- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2276 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002278 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2279 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2280 new -l and -e options.
2281
2282- statcache is now deprecated.
2283
2284- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2285 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002286 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002287 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2288 time properly taken into account.
2289
2290- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2291 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2292 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2293 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2294
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002295Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002296-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002297
2298Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002299-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002300
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002301- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2302 is built with libdb3 if available.
2303
2304- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2305
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002306C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002307-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002308
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002309- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2310 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2311 PySequence_Size().
2312
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002313- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2314
2315- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2316 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2317 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2318
2319- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2320 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2321
2322- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2323 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2324
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002325New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002326-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002327
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002328- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2329 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2330
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002331- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2332 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2333
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002334- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002336Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002337-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002338
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002339- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2340 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2341
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002342Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002343-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002344
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002345Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002346----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002347
2348- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2349 removed completely in the next release.
2350
2351- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2352 OSX.
2353
2354- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2355 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2356
2357- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2358
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002359
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002360What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002361===========================
2362
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002363*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2364
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002365Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002366--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002367
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002368- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002369 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002370 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002371 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2372 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002373 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2374 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002375 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2376 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002377
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002378- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2379 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2380
2381- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2382 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2383
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002384Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002385-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002386
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002387- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2388 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2389 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2390 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2391 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2392 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2393 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2394 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2395
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002396- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2397 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2398 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2399 example).
2400
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002401- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002402 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002403 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002404 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002405
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002406- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2407 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2408 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002409 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002410
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002411- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2412 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2413 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2414 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2415 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2416 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2417
2418 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2419
2420 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2421
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002422Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002423-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002424
2425- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2426
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002427- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2428
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002429- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2430 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002431
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002432- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2433 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2434 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2435 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2436 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2437 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002438 attributes.
2439
2440- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2441 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2442 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002443
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002444- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2445 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2446 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002447
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002448- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2449 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2450 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002451 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2452 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2453
2454- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2455 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002456
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002457Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002458-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002459
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002460- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2461 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2462
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002463- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2464 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2465 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2466 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2467
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002468- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2469 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2470 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2471 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2472
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002473 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2474 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2475 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2476 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2477 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2478 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2479 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2480 without losing information).
2481
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002482- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002483 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2484 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2485 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2486 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2487 module).
2488
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002489 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002490 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2491 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2492 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2493 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002494
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002495- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002496 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2497 encoding.
2498
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002499- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2500 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2501
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002502- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002503 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2504
2505- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2506 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2507 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2508 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2509
2510- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2511
2512- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2513 ON, and OFF.
2514
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002515- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2516 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2517
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002518Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002519-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002520
2521- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2522 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2523 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002524
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002525- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2526 been added: -X and -E.
2527
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002528Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002529-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002530
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002531- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2532 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2533
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002534C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002536
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002537- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2538 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2539 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2540 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2541 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2542
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002543- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2544 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2545 as long) arguments.
2546
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002547- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2548 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2549 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2550 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2551 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2552 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2553
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002554- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2555 input.
2556
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002557New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002559
2560Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002561-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002562
2563Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002564-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002565
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002566- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2567 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2568 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2569
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002570- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2571 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2572 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002573 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002574
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002575 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2576 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2577 import signal
2578 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002579
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002580 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002581 while 1:
2582 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002583 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002584 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2585 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2586 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2587 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002588
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002589
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002590What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2591===========================
2592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002593*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2594
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002595Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002596--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002597
2598- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2599 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2600 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2601
2602- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2603 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2604 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2605 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2606 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2607 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2608 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002609
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002610- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002611 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002612 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2613 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2614 associate a docstring with a property.
2615
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002616- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2617 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2618 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2619 other built-in object types.
2620
2621- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2622 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2623 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2624 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2625 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2626
2627- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2628 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2629
2630- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2631 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002632 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002633 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2634 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2635 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2636 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2637 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2638
2639- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2640 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2641 class.
2642
2643- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2644 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2645 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2646 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2647
2648- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2649 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2650 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2651 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2652
2653- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2654 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2655
2656- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2657 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2658 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2659 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2660 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002661 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002662 with the same value as s.
2663
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002664- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2665
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002666Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002668
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002669- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2670
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002671- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2672 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2673 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2674 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2675 objects.
2676
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002677- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2678 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002679 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2680 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2681
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002682- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2683 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2684 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2685
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002686Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002688
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002689- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2690 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2691 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2692 by the instances.
2693
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002694- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2695 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2696 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2697
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002698- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2699 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2700 before the entire comparison is complete.
2701
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002702- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2703 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2704 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2705
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002706- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2707 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2708 getwriter().
2709
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002710- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2711 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2712
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002713- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002714 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2715 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2716
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002717- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2718 iterable object.
2719
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002720- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2721 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002722
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002723- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2724 authentication.
2725
2726- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2727 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002728
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002729- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002730 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2731 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2732 a sample driver.)
2733
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002734Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002735-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002736
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002737- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2738 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2739 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2740 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2741 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2742 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2743 kernel has large file support.
2744
2745- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2746 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2747 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2748 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2749 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2750
2751- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2752 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2753 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002755C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002756-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002757
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002758- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2759 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2760
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002761New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002762-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002763
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002764- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2765 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2766
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002767Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002769
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002770- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2771 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2772 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2773 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2774 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2775
2776- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2777 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2778 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2779 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2780
2781- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2782 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2783
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002784Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002786
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002787- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002788 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2789 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002790
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002791
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002792What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2793===========================
2794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002795*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2796
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002797Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002798----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002799
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002800- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2801 big to represent as a C double.
2802
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002803- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2804 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2805 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2806 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2807 restriction).
2808
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002809- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2810 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2811 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2812 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2813 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2814
2815 >>> dir([])
2816 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2817 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2818 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2819 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2820 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2821 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2822 'reverse', 'sort']
2823
2824 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2825
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002826- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002827 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2828 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2829 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2830 OverflowError exception.
2831
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002832- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002833 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002834 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2835 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2836 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2837 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2838 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002839 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002840 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2841 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2842
2843 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2844 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2845 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2846 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002847
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002848- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002849 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2850 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2851 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2852 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2853 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2854 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2855 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2856 once it is created.
2857
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002858- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2859 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2860 (key, value) pairs.
2861
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002862- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002863 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2864 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2865
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002866- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2867 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2868 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2869 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2870 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002871
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002872- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002873 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2874 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2875
2876 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2877
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002878- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002879 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2880
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002881Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002882-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002883
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002884- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002885 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2886 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002887
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002888- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2889 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2890 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2891 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2892 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2893 in this area anymore).
2894
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002895- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2896 threading.Timer.
2897
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002898- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2899 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2900
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002901- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002902 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2903
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002904- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002905 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2906 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2907 converted to Python longs.
2908
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002909- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002910 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2911
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002912- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2913 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2914 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2915
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002916Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002918
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002919- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2920 division operators as per PEP 238.
2921
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002922Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002923-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002924
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002925- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2926 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2927 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2928 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2929
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002930C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002932
2933- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002934
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002935- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2936 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002937 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002938
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002939 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2940 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002941 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002943
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002944- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002945 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2946 module:
2947
2948 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002949
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002950 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2951 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002952
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002953 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2954 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002955
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002956 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2957
2958 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2959
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002960- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002961 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2962 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2963 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002964
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002965New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002967
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002968- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2969 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2970 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2971 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2972 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002973
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002974Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002976
2977Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002979
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002980- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2981 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2982 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2983 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002984 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2985 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2986 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2987 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2988 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002989
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002990- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002991 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2992
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002993
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002994What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2995===========================
2996
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002997*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2998
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002999Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003001
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003002- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3003 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3004
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003005- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3006 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3007 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003008
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003009- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3010 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3011 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3012 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003013
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003014- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3015
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003017
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003018Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003020
3021- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003022 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003023 the module docstring for details.
3024
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003025Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003027
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003028- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003029 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3030 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3031 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003032
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003033- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3034 Nick Mathewson.
3035
3036Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003038
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003039- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3040 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3041 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3042 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3043 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3044 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3045 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3046 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3047
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003048- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3049 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3050 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3051 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3052
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003053- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3054 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3055 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3056 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3057 come a long way).
3058
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003059- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3060 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3061 write filters for these warnings).
3062
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003063- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3064 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3065 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3066 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3067 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3068
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003069- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3070 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3071 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3072 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3073 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3074 older distribution.
3075
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003076Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003078
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003079- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3080 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003081 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003082
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003083- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3084 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3085 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3086
3087- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3088
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003089- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3090
3091- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3092
3093- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3094
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003095- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003096
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003097- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3098
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003099New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003100-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003101
3102C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003104
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003105- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3106 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3107 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3108 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3109 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3110 against buffer overruns.
3111
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003112- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003113 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3114 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003115 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3116 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3117 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3118
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003119- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3120 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3121 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3122 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3123 deprecated.
3124
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003125Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003127
3128- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3129 relevant is found.
3130
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003131
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003132What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003133===========================
3134
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3136
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003137Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003139
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003140- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3141 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3142 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3143 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3144 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3145 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3146 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3147 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003148 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003149 repaired.
3150
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003151- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003152 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003153 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3154 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3155 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3156 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3157 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3158 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3159 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3160 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3161
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003162- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3163 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3164 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3165 leading BMO character).
3166
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003167- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3168 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3169 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3170
3171 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3172 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3173 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003174
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003175 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3176 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3177 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3178 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3179 for various simple to use conversions.
3180
3181 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3182 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3183
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003184 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3185 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3186 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3187 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3188 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3189 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3190 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3191 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3192 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3193 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3194 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3195 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3196 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3197 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3198 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003199
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003200- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3201 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3202 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003203 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003204 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003205
3206 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003207 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3208 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3209 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3210 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3211 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003212 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3213 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003214
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003215 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3216 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3217 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003218 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003219
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003220- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3221 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3222 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3223 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3224 floating arithmetic,
3225
3226 x = 9007199254740992.0
3227 print long(x)
3228
3229 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3230 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3231 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3232 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3233 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3234 functions are of good quality).
3235
3236 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3237 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3238 algorithms to break.
3239
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003240- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3241 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3242 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3243 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3244 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3245 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3246 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3247 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3248 order.
3249
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003250- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3251 operation along the most common code paths.
3252
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003253- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3254 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3255
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003256- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3257 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3258 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3259 {}.update(UserDict())
3260
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003261- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3262 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3263 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3264 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3265 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3266 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3267 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3268 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3269
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003270- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003271 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003272
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003273 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003274 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3275 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003276 join() method of strings
3277 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003278 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3279 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003280 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003281 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003282
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003283- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3284 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3285
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003286- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3287 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3288
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003289- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3290 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3291 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3292 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3293
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003294- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3295 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003296 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003297 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3298 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003299
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003300- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3301
3302
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003303Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003304-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003305
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003306- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003307 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003308 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3309 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3310
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003311- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3312 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3313
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003314- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3315 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3316 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3317 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3318
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003319- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3320 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3321 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3322
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003323- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3324
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003325- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3326
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003327- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3328 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3329 that are still imported into string.py).
3330
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003331- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3332
3333- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3334 Now it does.
3335
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003336- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3337
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003338- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3339 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3340 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3341 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3342 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003343 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3344 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003345
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003346- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3347 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3348 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3349 'help(object)'.
3350
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003351Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003353
3354- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003355 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003356 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3357 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3358
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003359- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003360 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3361 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003362
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003363C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003365
3366- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3367 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003368
3369----
3370
3371**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**