blob: df044f41390cd61b620840f82420cbcb74026cc2 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000013- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
14
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000015- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
16 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
17
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000018- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000019 an ferror() call.
20
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000021- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
22 list.sort().
23
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000024- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
25 (2+3) --> (5).
26
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000027- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
28
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000029- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
30 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000031
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000032- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
33 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
34 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
35
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000036Extension Modules
37-----------------
38
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000039- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
40
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000041- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
42 {remove_history,replace_history}
43
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000044- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
45 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000046
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000047- stat_float_times is now True.
48
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000049- array.array objects are now picklable.
50
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000051- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
52 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
53
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000054- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
55 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
56 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
57
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000058- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
59 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000060
61Library
62-------
63
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +000064- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
65
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +000066- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
67
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +000068- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
69
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +000070- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
71
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +000072- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
73
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +000074- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
75
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +000076- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
77
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +000078- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
79
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +000080- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
81 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
82 be exploited in various ways.
83
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +000084- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
85
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +000086- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
87
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +000088- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
89
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +000090- Enhancements to the csv module:
91
92 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
93 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
94 PEP 305.
95 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
96 reporting.
97 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
98 dictates.
99 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000100 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000101 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000102 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
103 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000104 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
105 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000106 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000107 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
108 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
109 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
110 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
111 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
112 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
113 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
114 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
115 without first creating a dialect class.
116 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
117 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
118 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000119 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000120 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
121 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000122 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
123 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
124 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
125 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000126 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
127 This has been fixed.
128
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000129- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
130 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
131 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
132 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
133
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000134- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
135
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000136- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
137 (Bug #951915).
138
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000139- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
140 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
141 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
142 encoding alias table
143
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000144- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
145
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000146- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
147 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
148
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000149- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
150
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000151- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
152
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000153- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
154
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000155- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
156
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000157- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
158
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000159- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
160 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
161 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
162
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000163- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000164 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000165
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000166- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
167 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
168 tokenizer with very long source lines.
169
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000170- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
171 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
172
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000173- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
174 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000175
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000176- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
177 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
178
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000179Build
180-----
181
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000182- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
183 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
184
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000185- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
186 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
187 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
188 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
189 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
190 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
191 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
192 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
193
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000194- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
195 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
196 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
197 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
198
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000199
200C API
201-----
202
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000203- Removed PyRange_New().
204
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000205
206Tests
207-----
208
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000209- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000210
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000211
212Documentation
213-------------
214
215- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
216 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
217 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
218
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000219Mac
220---
221
222
223
224Tools/Demos
225-----------
226
227
228
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000229What's New in Python 2.4 final?
230===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000231
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000232*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000233
234Core and builtins
235-----------------
236
237- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
238 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
239 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
240
241
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000242What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
243==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000244
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000245*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000246
247Core and builtins
248-----------------
249
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000250- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
251 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
252 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
253
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000254
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000255Library
256-------
257
258- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
259 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
260 raised is re-raised.
261
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000262- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
263 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
264
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000265- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
266 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
267 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
268 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
269 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
270 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
271 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
272 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
273 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
274 by the slice are recomputed now.
275
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000276- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000277
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000278Build
279-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000280
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000281- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
282 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
283 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000284
285C API
286-----
287
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000288- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
289
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000290
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000291What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
292================================
293
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000294*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000295
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000296License
297-------
298
299The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
300is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
301changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
302Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
303intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
304durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
305the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
306License::
307
308 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
309
310says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
311to Python 2.1.1.
312
313The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
314License Version 2.
315
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000316Core and builtins
317-----------------
318
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000319- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
320 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
321 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
322 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
323 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
324 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
325 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
326 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
327 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
328 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
329
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000330- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000331
332Extension Modules
333-----------------
334
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000335- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
336 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
337 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
338 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000339
340Library
341-------
342
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000343- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
344 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
345 returned.
346
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000347- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
348
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000349- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
350 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
351
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000352- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
353
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000354- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
355 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000356
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000357- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
358
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000359- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
360
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000361- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000362 the source code is updated and reloaded.
363
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000364Build
365-----
366
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000367- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000368
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000369What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
370================================
371
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000372*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000373
374Core and builtins
375-----------------
376
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000377- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000378 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
379
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000380- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
381 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
382 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
383 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
384
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000385- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
386 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
387
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000388- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
389 constant.
390
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000391- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
392 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
393 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
394 large), and to anomalies such as
395 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
396 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
397 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
398 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000399
400Extension modules
401-----------------
402
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000403- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
404 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000405 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
406 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
407 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000408
409Library
410-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000411
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000412- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000413 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000414 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
415 --swig-cpp.
416
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000417- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
418 it is set.
419
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000420- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000421
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000422- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
423 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
424 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
425 Closes bug #1039270.
426
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000427- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000428
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000429 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000430 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
431 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
432 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
433 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
434 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
435 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
436 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
437 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
438 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
439 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
440 + Updates to documentation.
441
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000442- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
443 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
444 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
445 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
446
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000447- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000448
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000449- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
450 applications should use the getmember function.
451
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000452- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
453
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000454- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
455 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
456 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
457 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
458 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
459 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
460 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
461 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
462 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
463
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000464- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
465 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000466 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000467
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000468- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
469 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
470 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
471 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
472 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
473 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
474 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
475 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000476
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000477- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
478 the new public features (of which there are many).
479
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000480- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000481 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
482 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
483 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
484 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000485 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000486
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000487- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
488
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000489- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
490 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
491 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
492 options.
493
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000494- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
495 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
496 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
497 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
498 conditions under which non-string values work.
499
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000500Build
501-----
502
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000503- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
504 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
505 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
506
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000507- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
508 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
509 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
510 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
511 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000512
513C API
514-----
515
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000516- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
517 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
518
519- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
520
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000521- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
522 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
523 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
524 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
525 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
526 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
527 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
528 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
529 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
530
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000531- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
532
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000533- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
534 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
535 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000536
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000537Tests
538-----
539
540- test__locale ported to unittest
541
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000542Mac
543---
544
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000545- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
546 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
547 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000548
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000549Tools/Demos
550-----------
551
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000552- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
553 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
554 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
555 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
556 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000557
558
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000559What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
560=================================
561
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000562*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000563
564Core and builtins
565-----------------
566
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000567- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000568 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
569
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000570- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
571 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
572 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
573 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
574 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
575 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
576 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
577 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000578 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
579 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
580 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
581 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
582 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000583
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000584- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
585 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
586 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
587 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
588 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
589
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000590- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
591
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000592- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
593 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
594
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000595- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
596 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
597 modified the list.
598
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000599- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
600 functions is now writable.
601
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000602- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
603 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
604 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
605 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
606
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000607- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
608 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
609 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
610 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
611 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000612
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000613- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
614 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
615
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000616Extension modules
617-----------------
618
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000619- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
620
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000621- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
622 data.
623
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000624- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
625 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
626 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
627 supposed to have been truncated away.
628
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000629- Added socket.socketpair().
630
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000631- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
632 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
633
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000634- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000635 versions of Python, have now been removed.
636
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000637Library
638-------
639
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000640- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000641 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000642
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000643- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
644 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
645
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000646- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
647 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
648
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000649- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
650
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000651- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
652 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000653
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000654- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
655 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
656
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000657- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
658
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000659- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
660
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000661- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
662
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000663- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
664 Percivall.
665
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000666- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
667 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
668
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000669- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
670 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
671 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000672 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000673
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000674- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
675 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
676 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
677 and exponent.
678
679- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
680
681- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
682 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
683 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
684
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000685- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
686 to the readline module.
687
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000688- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000689 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
690 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000691
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000692- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
693 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
694 contains symlinks.
695
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000696- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
697 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
698
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000699- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
700 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
701 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
702
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000703- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
704 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
705 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
706 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
707 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
708 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
709 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
710 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
711 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
712 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
713 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
714 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
715 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
716
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000717- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
718
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000719Tools/Demos
720-----------
721
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000722- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
723 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
724
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000725- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
726
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000727Build
728-----
729
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000730- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
731 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
732 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
733 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
734 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
735 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
736 plans to do so.
737
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000738- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
739 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
740
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000741- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
742 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
743
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000744- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
745 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
746
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000747- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
748 GNU/k*BSD systems.
749
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000750- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
751 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
752
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000753C API
754-----
755
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000756..
757
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000758Documentation
759-------------
760
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000761- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
762 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
763
764- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
765 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
766 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000767
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000768New platforms
769-------------
770
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000771- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
772
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000773Tests
774-----
775
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000776..
777
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000778Windows
779-------
780
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000781- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
782 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
783 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
784 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
785 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
786 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
787 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
788 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
789 the problem.
790
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000791Mac
792---
793
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000794..
795
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000796
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000797What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
798=================================
799
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000800*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000801
802Core and builtins
803-----------------
804
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000805- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
806 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
807 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
808 sensitive code.
809
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000810- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000811 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000812
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000813 @staticmethod
814 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000815
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000816 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000817
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000818- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
819 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
820 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
821 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
822 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
823 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
824 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
825 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
826 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
827 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
828 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
829
830 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
831 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
832 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
833 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
834 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
835 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
836 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
837
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000838- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
839 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
840
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000841- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000842 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000843
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000844- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000845 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000846 which was missing for no apparent reason.
847
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000848- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000849 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
850 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
851
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000852- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
853 types that support garbage collection.
854
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000855- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
856
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000857- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
858 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
859 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
860 Jython.
861
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000862- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
863
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000864- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
865 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
866
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000867- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
868 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
869 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000870
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000871- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
872 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
873 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
874
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000875Extension modules
876-----------------
877
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000878- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
879
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000880Library
881-------
882
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000883- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
884 TIS-620
885
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000886- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
887 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
888 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
889 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
890 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
891 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
892 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
893 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
894 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
895 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
896
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000897- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
898
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000899- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
900 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
901 same as when the argument is omitted).
902 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
903
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000904- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
905
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000906- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
907 schemes are offered.
908
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000909- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
910
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000911- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
912 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
913 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
914
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000915- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
916
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000917- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
918 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
919
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000920- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
921 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
922 when dummy_threading is being used.
923
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000924- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
925 from a tarfile.
926
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000927- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000928 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000929
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000930- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
931 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
932 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
933 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
934
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000935- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
936 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
937
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000938- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
939 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
940 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
941 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
942 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
943 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
944 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
945 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
946 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
947 by some other method in progress).
948
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000949- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
950 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
951 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000952
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000953- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
954
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000955- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
956 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
957 AM Kuchling.
958
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000959- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
960 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
961 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
962
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000963- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
964 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
965 instead of unsigned.
966
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000967- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000968 no longer part of the public API.
969
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000970- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
971 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
972 string methods of the same name).
973
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000974- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000975 SF patch 945642.
976
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000977- doctest unittest integration improvements:
978
979 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
980
981 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
982 DocTestSuites.
983
984- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
985 that provide thread-local data.
986
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000987- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
988 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
989
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000990- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
991
992- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
993 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
994 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
995
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000996- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
997
998 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
999 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1000 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001001
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001002 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1003 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1004 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1005 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1006
1007 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1008 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1009
1010 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1011 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1012 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1013 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1014
1015 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1016 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1017 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1018 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1019 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1020
1021 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1022 wrapping help output.
1023
1024 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1025 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1026 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001027
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001028C API
1029-----
1030
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001031- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1032 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1033 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1034 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1035 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1036 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1037 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1038 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1039 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1040 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1041 its visible semantics have not changed.
1042
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001043- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1044 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1045
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001046Documentation
1047-------------
1048
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001049- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001050
1051 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001052 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001053
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001054 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001055
1056 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1057
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001058- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001059
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001060Tests
1061-----
1062
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001063- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001064 platforms that use the Makefile.
1065
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001066- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1067 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1068 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1069
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001070
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001071What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1072=================================
1073
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001074*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001075
1076Core and builtins
1077-----------------
1078
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001079- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1080 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1081 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1082 objects now (one object instead of three).
1083
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001084- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1085 Windows DLLs.
1086
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001087- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1088 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001089
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001090- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1091 a new .pyc magic.
1092
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001093- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1094 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1095 be there.
1096
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001097- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1098 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1099 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1100
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001101- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1102 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1103 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1104
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001105- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1106
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001107- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1108 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1109 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001110
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001111- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1112 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1113
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001114- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1115
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001116- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001117 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001118
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001119- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1120
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001121- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1122
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001123- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1124 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1125
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001126- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1127 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1128 Fixes bug #858016 .
1129
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001130- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1131 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1132 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1133
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001134- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1135 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1136 improves their performance (about 35%).
1137
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001138- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1139 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1140 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1141
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001142- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1143 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1144 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1145 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1146
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001147- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1148 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1149 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1150 length is not known).
1151
1152- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1153 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001154 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1155 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001156 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1157
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001158- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1159 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1160
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001161- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1162 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1163 keyword arguments.
1164
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001165- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1166 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1167 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1168
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001169- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1170 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1171 cases.
1172
1173- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1174 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1175 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1176 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1177 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1178 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1179 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1180 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1181 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1182 a release build.
1183
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001184- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1185 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1186
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001187- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001188 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001189
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001190- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1191 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1192 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1193 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1194 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1195 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1196 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1197 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1198 destroyed.
1199
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001200- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1201 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1202 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1203 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1204 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1205 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1206 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1207 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1208
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001209- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1210 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1211 character other than a space.
1212
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001213- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1214 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1215 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1216 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1217 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1218 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1219 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1220 attributes with the same name.
1221
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001222- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1223 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1224 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1225 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1226 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1227 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1228 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1229 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1230 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1231 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1232 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1233 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1234 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1235 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001236
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001237- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1238 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1239 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1240 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1241 This has been repaired.
1242
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001243- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1244
1245- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1246
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001247- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1248 over a sequence.
1249
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001250- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001251 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001252
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001253- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1254
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001255- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1256 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1257 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1258 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1259 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1260 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1261 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1262 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1263
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001264- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1265 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1266 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1267
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001268- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1269 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1270 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1271 freelist.
1272
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001273- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1274 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1275
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001276- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1277 number.
1278
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001279- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1280 a TypeError exception.
1281
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001282- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1283 820195.
1284
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001285- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1286 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1287 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1288
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001289- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001290 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1291 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001292
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001293- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1294 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1295 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1296
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001297- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1298 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001299 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001300
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001301- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001302 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1303 the first call.
1304
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001305
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001306Extension modules
1307-----------------
1308
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001309- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1310 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1311
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001312- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1313 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1314 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1315 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1316 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1317 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1318 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001319
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001320- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1321
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001322- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1323
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001324- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1325 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1326
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001327- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1328 fewer false positives.
1329
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001330- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1331 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1332
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001333- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001334 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1335
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001336- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001337 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001338 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001339 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1340 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001341
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001342- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1343 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1344 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1345 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1346
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001347- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1348 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1349 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1350 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1351 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1352 #897625.
1353
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001354- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1355 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1356
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001357- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1358 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1359 and pops on either side of the deque.
1360
1361- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1362 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1363
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001364- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1365 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1366 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1367 other functions that expect a function argument.
1368
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001369- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1370
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001371- os.getsid was added.
1372
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001373- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1374 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1375 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1376
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001377- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1378
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001379- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1380
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001381- readline.clear_history was added.
1382
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001383- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1384
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001385- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1386
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001387- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1388
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001389- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1390
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001391- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1392
1393- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1394
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001395- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1396
1397- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1398
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001399- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1400 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1401 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1402
1403- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1404 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1405 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1406 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1407 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1408 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1409 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1410
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001411- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1412 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1413 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1414 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001415
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001416- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001417 iterators from a single iterable.
1418
1419- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1420 of raising a TypeError exception.
1421
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001422- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1423 as parameter.
1424
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001425Library
1426-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001427
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001428- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1429 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1430 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001431
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001432- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1433 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1434 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001435
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001436- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001437
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001438- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1439 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001440
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001441- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1442 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1443
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001444- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1445
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001446- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001447 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001448
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001449- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001450 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001451
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001452- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1453
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001454- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1455 on cygwin and mingw32.
1456
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001457- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1458
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001459- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1460 module.
1461
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001462- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1463 installation scheme for all platforms.
1464
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001465- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001466 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001467
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001468- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1469 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1470 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1471
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001472- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1473 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1474 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1475
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001476- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1477
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001478- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1479
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001480- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1481 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1482
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001483- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1484 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1485 type pattern with the same value exists.
1486
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001487- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1488 when run from the command prompt).
1489
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001490- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1491 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1492
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001493- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1494 default sort).
1495
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001496- Added global runctx function to profile module
1497
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001498- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1499
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001500- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1501
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001502- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1503
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001504- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001505 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1506 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1507 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1508 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1509 accordingly.
1510
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001511- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1512 decoding standards.
1513
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001514- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1515 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1516 called for all requests.
1517
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001518- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1519 they are passed to the compiler.
1520
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001521- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1522 indent, width and depth.
1523
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001524- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1525 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1526
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001527- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1528 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1529
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001530- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1531
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001532- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1533
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001534- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1535
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001536- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1537 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1538
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001539- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001540 for better performance.
1541
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001542- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001543
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001544- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1545 a string).
1546
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001547- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1548
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001549- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1550
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001551- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1552
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001553- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1554
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001555- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1556 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1557 list of fieldnames.
1558
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001559- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1560 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1561
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001562- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1563
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001564- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1565 empty lists.
1566
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001567- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1568 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1569 and shelves.
1570
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001571- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1572 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1573
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001574- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001575 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1576 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001577
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001578- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1579 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001580 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001581
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001582- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001583 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1584 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1585
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001586- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1587 and removed in Py2.4.
1588
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001589- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1590
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001591- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1592
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001593Tools/Demos
1594-----------
1595
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001596- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1597 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1598
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001599- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1600
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001601- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1602 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1603 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1604 destination in situations where both files are given.
1605
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001606- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1607 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1608 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1609 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1610
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001611- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1612
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001613- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1614 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1615 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1616 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1617 now.
1618
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001619- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1620 in effect
1621
1622- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1623 C-c C-h
1624
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001625- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1626 -d option was given.
1627
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001628Build
1629-----
1630
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001631- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1632 build under OS X.
1633
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001634- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1635 --enable-profiling.
1636
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001637- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1638 is configured --with-tsc.
1639
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001640- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1641 on AMD64.
1642
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001643- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1644 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1645
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001646- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1647 removed.
1648
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001649- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1650 supported (see PEP 11).
1651
1652- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1653
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001654- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1655
1656- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1657 (see PEP 11).
1658
1659- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1660 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1661
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001662C API
1663-----
1664
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001665- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1666 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1667 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1668
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001669- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1670 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1671 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1672 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1673
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001674- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1675 generator objects.
1676
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001677- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1678 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001679 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1680 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001681
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001682- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1683 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1684
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001685- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1686 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1687 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1688 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1689 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1690
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001691- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1692 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1693 about 10% faster.
1694
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001695- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1696 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1697
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001698- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1699 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1700 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1701 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1702
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001703Windows
1704-------
1705
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001706- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1707 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1708 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1709 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1710
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001711- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1712 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1713 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1714
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001715
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001716What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1717===============================
1718
1719*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1720
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001721IDLE
1722----
1723
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001724- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1725 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1726 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1727 context-menu actions.
1728
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001729- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1730 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1731 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1732 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1733 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1734 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1735 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1736 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1737 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1738
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001739
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001740What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1741=============================================
1742
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001743*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001744
1745Core and builtins
1746-----------------
1747
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001748- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001749 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001750 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1751
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001752Extension modules
1753-----------------
1754
1755- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1756 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1757 than once. This has been fixed.
1758
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001759- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1760 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1761 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1762 call.
1763
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001764- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1765
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001766Library
1767-------
1768
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001769- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1770 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1771
1772- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1773 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1774 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1775 restored.
1776
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001777IDLE
1778----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001779
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001780- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001781
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001782Build
1783-----
1784
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001785- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1786 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1787
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001788C API
1789-----
1790
1791Windows
1792-------
1793
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001794- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1795 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1796
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001797- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1798
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001799Mac
1800---
1801
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001802- Various fixes to pimp.
1803
1804- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1805
1806- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1807 more problems than it solves.
1808
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001809
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001810What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1811=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001812
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001813*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1814
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001815Core and builtins
1816-----------------
1817
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001818- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1819 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1820
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001821- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1822 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001823 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001824
1825- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1826 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1827 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001828 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001829
1830- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1831 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001832
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001833- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1834 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1835 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1836
1837- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001838 770247.
1839
1840- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001841
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001842Extension modules
1843-----------------
1844
1845- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1846 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1847
1848- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1849
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001850- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1851
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001852- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1853 contained within the _strptime module.
1854
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001855- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1856 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1857
1858- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001859 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1860
1861- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1862 the find_class attribute, if present.
1863
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001864- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001865
1866 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1867 (SF bug 763298).
1868
1869 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001870 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1871 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1872 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001873
1874 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1875
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001876Library
1877-------
1878
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001879- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1880
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001881- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1882 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1883 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1884 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1885 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1886 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1887 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1888 or Tester().
1889
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001890- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1891 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1892 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1893 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1894 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1895 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1896 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1897 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1898 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001899
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001900 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001901
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001902- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1903 weren't before was an oversight.
1904
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001905- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1906 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1907
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001908- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1909 when there are no lines.
1910
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001911- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1912 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1913
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001914- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1915 to child processes.
1916
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001917- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1918
1919- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1920
1921- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1922 xmlrpclib.
1923
1924- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1925 responses.
1926
1927- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1928 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1929
1930- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1931 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1932 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1933
1934- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1935 used as patterns.
1936
1937- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1938 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1939 than Tk 8.3.
1940
1941- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1942
1943- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001944
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001945Tools/Demos
1946-----------
1947
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001948- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1949
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001950- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1951
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001952- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001953
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001954Build
1955-----
1956
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001957- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1958
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001959- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1960
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001961- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1962 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001963
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001964- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1965 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1966 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001967
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001968C API
1969-----
1970
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001971- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1972 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1973
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001974Windows
1975-------
1976
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001977- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1978 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1979 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1980 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1981 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1982 Python exception ::
1983
1984 thread.error: can't start new thread
1985
1986 is raised now.
1987
1988- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1989 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1990 instead of from DLL teardown.
1991
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001992Mac
1993---
1994
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001995- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001996 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001997 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1998 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1999 the executable in the bundle.
2000
2001- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002002
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002003- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2004
2005- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2006 on Panther.
2007
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002008What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2009================================
2010
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002011*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002012
2013Core and builtins
2014-----------------
2015
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002016- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2017 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2018 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2019 with the -i option.
2020
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002021- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2022 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2023
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002024- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2025 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2026
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002027- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2028 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2029 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2030 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2031 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2032 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2033 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2034 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2035 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2036 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2037 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2038 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2039 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002040
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002041- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2042 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2043 embedded in a lambda expression.
2044
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002045- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2046 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2047 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2048 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2049 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2050
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002051- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2052 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2053 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2054
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002055- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2056 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2057
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002058- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2059 It's writable again.
2060
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002061- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2062 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2063 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002064 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002065
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002066- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2067 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2068 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2069
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002070Extension modules
2071-----------------
2072
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002073- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2074 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2075
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002076- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2077 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2078 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2079 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2080
2081- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2082 collection.
2083
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002084- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2085 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2086 unique within a single program run.
2087
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002088- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2089 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2090
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002091- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2092 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2093
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002094- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2095 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002096
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002097- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2098
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002099- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2100 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2101
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002102- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2103 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2104 for many BSD-derived systems.
2105
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002106
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002107Library
2108-------
2109
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002110- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2111 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2112 primary ones:
2113
2114 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2115 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2116 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2117
2118 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2119 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2120 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2121 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2122 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2123 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2124
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002125- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2126 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2127 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2128 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2129 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2130 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2131 argument.
2132
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002133- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2134 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2135 in the archive.
2136
2137- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2138 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2139
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002140- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2141 569574).
2142
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002143- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2144 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2145 no more.
2146
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002147- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2148 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2149 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2150 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2151 code coverage.
2152
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002153- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2154 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2155 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002156 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2157 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002158
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002159- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2160 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2161 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002162 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002163
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002164- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2165
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002166- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2167 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2168 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2169 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2170
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002171- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2172 handling.
2173
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002174- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2175 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2176
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002177- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2178 in socket.py.
2179
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002180- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2181
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002182- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2183 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2184 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2185 opener with proxy support.
2186
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002187- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2188
2189- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2190
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002191Tools/Demos
2192-----------
2193
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002194- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2195
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002196- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2197
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002198- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2199 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002200
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002201- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2202 files.
2203
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002204Build
2205-----
2206
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002207- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002208 different root directory.
2209
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002210C API
2211-----
2212
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002213- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2214 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2215 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2216 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2217 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2218 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2219 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2220 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2221 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2222 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2223
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002224- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2225 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2226 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2227 from Python.
2228
2229
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002230New platforms
2231-------------
2232
2233None this time.
2234
2235Tests
2236-----
2237
2238- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2239 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2240
2241Windows
2242-------
2243
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002244- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2245
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002246- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2247 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2248 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2249 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2250 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2251 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2252 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2253 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2254 that's what it's for.
2255
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002256Mac
2257---
2258
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002259- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2260 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2261 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2262 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002263- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2264 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2265- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002266
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002267SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2268------------------------------------
2269
2270430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2271598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2272622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2273661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2274683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2275697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2276713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2277724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2278727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2279729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2280730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2281731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2282732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2283733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2284735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2285740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2286744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2287745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2288747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2289749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2290751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2291753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2292755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2293757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2294760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2295
2296
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002297What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2298================================
2299
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002300*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002301
2302Core and builtins
2303-----------------
2304
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002305- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2306 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2307
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002308- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2309 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2310 and cannot be strings).
2311
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002312- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2313 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2314 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2315 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2316
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002317- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2318 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2319 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2320 Python itself.
2321
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002322- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2323 the referenced object, if it has one.
2324
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002325- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2326 the thread started at
2327 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2328
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002329- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2330 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2331 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2332 placed on a list index.
2333
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002334- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2335 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2336 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2337 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2338
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002339- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2340 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2341 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2342 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2343 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2344 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2345 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2346
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002347- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2348 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2349 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2350 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2351 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2352
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002353- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2354 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002355
2356- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2357 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2358 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2359 #693195.)
2360
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002361- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2362 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002363
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002364- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002365 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002366 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2367 interpreter executions, would fail.
2368
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002369- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002370 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002371 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002372
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002373Extension modules
2374-----------------
2375
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002376- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2377 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2378 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2379 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2380
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002381- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2382 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2383
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002384- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2385 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2386 and Greg Chapman.)
2387
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002388- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2389 recursively.
2390
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002391- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002392 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2393 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2394 leaks.
2395
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002396- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2397
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002398- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2399 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2400 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2401 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2402 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2403 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2404 #705836.
2405
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002406- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002407 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2408
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002409- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2410 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2411 See SF bug #692416.
2412
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002413- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2414 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2415
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002416- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2417 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2418 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002419
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002420- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002421 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2422 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2423
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002424- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2425 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2426 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2427 timeouts to work properly.
2428
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002429Library
2430-------
2431
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002432- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2433 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2434 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2435 future release.
2436
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002437- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2438 for querying platform dependent features.
2439
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002440- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002441
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002442- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2443 pickle protocol versions.
2444
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002445- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2446 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2447 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2448
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002449- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2450
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002451- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2452 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2453 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2454 modules.
2455
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002456- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2457 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2458 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2459
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002460- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2461 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2462
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002463- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2464 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2465 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2466
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002467- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002468 MS Office extensions.
2469
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002470- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2471 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2472
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002473- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2474 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2475
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002476- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2477 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2478 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2479 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2480 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2481 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2482
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002483- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2484 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2485 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002486
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002487- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2488 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2489 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2490
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002491- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2492
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002493- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2494 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2495 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2496
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002497Tools/Demos
2498-----------
2499
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002500- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2501 See the module docstring for details.
2502
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002503Build
2504-----
2505
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002506- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2507 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002508
2509C API
2510-----
2511
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002512- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2513
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002514- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2515 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2516 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2517
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002518- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2519 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002520
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002521 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2522 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2523 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002524
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002525- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002526 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2527
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002528- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2529 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2530 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002531
2532New platforms
2533-------------
2534
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002535None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002536
2537Tests
2538-----
2539
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002540- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2541 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002542
2543Windows
2544-------
2545
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002546- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2547 function.
2548
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002549- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2550 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002551
2552Mac
2553---
2554
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002555- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2556 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002557
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002558- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2559 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002560
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002561- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2562 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2563 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002564
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002565- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002566 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2567 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002568
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002569- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2570 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002571
2572
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002573What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2574=================================
2575
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002576*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002577
2578Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002579-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002580
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002581- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2582 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2583 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2584
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002585- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2586 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2587 (SF patch #664376.)
2588
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002589- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2590 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2591 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2592 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2593 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2594 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002595 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002596
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002597- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2598 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2599 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2600 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002601 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002602
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002603- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2604 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2605 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2606 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2607 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2608 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2609 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2610 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2611 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2612 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2613 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2614
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002615- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2616 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2617 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2618 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2619 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2620 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2621
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002622- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2623 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2624
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002625- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2626 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2627 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2628 case.)
2629
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002630- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2631 passed as unicode strings.
2632
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002633- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2634 See SF bug #683467.
2635
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002636- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2637 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2638
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002639- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2640
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002641- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2642
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002643- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2644 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2645 arguments.
2646
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002647- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2648 See SF bug #667147.
2649
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002650- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002651 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002652 See SF bug #676155.
2653
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002654- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002655 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002656 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2657 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2658 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2659 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2660 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2661 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002662
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002663Extension modules
2664-----------------
2665
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002666- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2667 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2668 tp_as_number pointer.
2669
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002670- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2671 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2672 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2673 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2674 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2675
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002676- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2677
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002678- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2679
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002680- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002681 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002682 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2683 patch #678531.)
2684
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002685- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2686 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2687
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002688- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2689 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2690
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002691- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2692
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002693- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2694 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2695 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2696
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002697- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2698
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002699- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2700 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2701
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002702- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002703
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002704- datetime changes:
2705
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002706 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2707
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002708 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2709 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2710 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2711 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2712 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2713 now.
2714
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002715 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002716 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2717 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002718
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002719 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002720 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002721 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2722 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2723 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2724 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002725
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002726 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2727 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2728 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002729 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2730
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002731 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2732 by a later example coded by Guido.
2733
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002734 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002735 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2736 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2737 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002738 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2739 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2740
2741 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2742 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2743 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2744 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2745 tzinfo subclass instance.
2746
2747 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2748 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2749 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2750 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2751 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2752 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2753 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2754 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002755
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002756 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2757 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2758 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2759 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2760 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002761 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2762
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002763 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002764
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002765 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2766 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2767 as a naive datetime object.
2768
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002769 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2770 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2771 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2772
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002773 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2774 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2775 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2776 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2777 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2778 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2779 comparison.
2780
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002781 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2782 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2783 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2784 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002785 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002786
2787 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002788
2789 and ::
2790
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002791 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2792
2793 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2794 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2795 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2796 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2797
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002798 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2799 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2800 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2801 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2802 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2803
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002804 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2805 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002806 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2807 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002808
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002809Library
2810-------
2811
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002812- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2813 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2814
2815- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2816 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2817 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2818 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2819 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2820 See PEP 307 for details.
2821
2822- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2823 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2824
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002825- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2826 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002827 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002828 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2829 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002830 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002831
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002832- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2833 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2834
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002835- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2836 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2837 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2838
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002839- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2840
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002841- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2842 exception.
2843
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002844- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2845 class.
2846
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002847- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2848 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2849 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2850
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002851- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2852 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2853
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002854- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002855 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2856 See SF bug #659228.
2857
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002858- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2859 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2860 See SF patch #651082.
2861
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002862- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002863
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002864- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2865 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2866
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002867- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002868 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002869
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002870- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2871 DOS paths from other platforms.
2872
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002873Tools/Demos
2874-----------
2875
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002876- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2877 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2878 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2879 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2880 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2881 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2882 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2883 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2884 example:
2885
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002886 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2887 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002888
2889 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2890
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002891
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002892Build
2893-----
2894
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002895- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2896 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2897 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002898 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2899
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002900 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2901
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002902- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2903 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2904 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2905 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2906 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2907 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2908 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2909 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2910 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2911
2912- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2913 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2914 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2915 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2916
2917- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2918 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2919
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002920C API
2921-----
2922
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002923- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2924 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002925
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002926- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2927 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2928 tp_as_number pointer.
2929
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002930- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2931 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2932 (SF #681367)
2933
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002934- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2935 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2936 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2937 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002938
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002939Tests
2940-----
2941
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002942- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002943 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2944 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2945 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2946 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2947 pydoc.)
2948
2949- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2950
2951- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002952
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002953Windows
2954-------
2955
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002956- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2957 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2958 time).
2959
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002960- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2961 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2962
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002963- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2964 release without strong cryptography.
2965
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002966- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002967 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002968
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002969- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2970 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2971
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002972Mac
2973---
2974
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002975- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2976 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002977
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002978- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2979 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2980 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002981
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002982- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2983 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002984
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002985- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2986 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2987 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2988 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002989
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002990- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002991 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2992 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2993 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002994
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002995
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002996What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002997=================================
2998
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002999*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003001Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003002--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003003
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003004- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3005
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003006- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3007 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003008 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003009 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003010 a different meaning than before.
3011
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003012- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003013 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003014 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003015
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003016- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003017 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003018 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003019
3020- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3021 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3022 and deallocation.
3023
3024- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3025 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3026
3027- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3028 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3029 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3030 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3031 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3032
3033- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3034 now detected by the garbage collector.
3035
3036- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3037 [SF bug 519621]
3038
3039- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3040 identifier.
3041
3042- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3043 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3044 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3045 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3046 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3047 [SF bug 563060]
3048
3049- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3050 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3051 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3052 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3053 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3054
3055- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3056 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3057 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3058
3059- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3060
3061- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3062 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3063 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3064 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3065 state of the slots would be lost.)
3066
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003067Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003069
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003070- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003071 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3072 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3073 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3074 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003075 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3076 Jython 2.1.
3077
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003078- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003079 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003080 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3081 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3082 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3083 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3084 these, see PEP 302.
3085
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003086- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3087 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3088 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3089
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003090- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3091 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3092 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3093
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003094- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3095 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3096 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3097
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003098- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3099 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3100 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3101 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3102 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3103 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3104 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3105 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3106 releases or implementations.
3107
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003108- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003109 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3110 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003111
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003112- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3113 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3114
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003115- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3116 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3117 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3118
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003119- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3120 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3121
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003122- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3123 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003124 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3125 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003126
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003127- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3128 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3129 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3130 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3131 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3132
3133 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3134 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3135 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3136 pattern.
3137
3138 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3139 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3140 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3141 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3142
3143 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3144 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3145 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3146 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3147 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3148 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3149
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003150- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3151 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3152 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3153 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3154 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3155 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3156 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3157 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003158
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003159- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3160 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3161 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3162 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3163 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003164 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3165 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3166 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3167 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3168 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3169 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3170 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003171
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003172- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3173 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3174
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003175- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3176 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3177 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3178 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3179 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3180 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3181 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3182 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3183 to Zack Weinberg!
3184
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003185- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3186 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3187 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3188 type. This has been fixed now.
3189
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003190- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3191 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3192 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3193
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003194- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3195 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3196 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3197 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3198 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3199 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3200 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3201 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003202 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003203
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003204- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3205 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3206 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003207
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003208- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3209 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3210 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3211 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3212 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3213 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3214 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3215 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003216 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003217 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3218 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3219
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003220- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3221 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3222 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3223 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3224 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3225 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3226 this.)
3227
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003228- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3229 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003230 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003231 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003232 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3233 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003234 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3235 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003236
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003237- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3238 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3239 currently running.
3240
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003241- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3242 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3243 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3244 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3245
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003246- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3247 as directory names.
3248
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003249- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3250 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3251
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003252- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3253 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3254
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003255- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003256 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3257 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003258
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003259- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3260 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3261 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3262 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3263 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3264
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003265- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3266 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3267 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3268 removed.
3269
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003270- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3271 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3272 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3273
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003274- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3275 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3276 to __debug__.
3277
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003278- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3279 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3280 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3281
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003282- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3283 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3284 deprecated now.
3285
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003286- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3287 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3288 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003289
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003290- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3291 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3292 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3293 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3294 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003295
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003296- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3297 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3298
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003299- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3300 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3301 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003302 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003303 is backward compatible.
3304
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003305- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3306 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3307 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3308 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3309 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3310
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003311- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3312 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3313 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3314 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3315 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3316 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003317
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003318- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3319 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3320
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003321- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3322 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3323
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003324- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3325 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3326 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3327 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3328 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3329
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003330- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3331 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3332 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3333
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003334- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003335 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3336
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003337- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3338 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3339 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003340
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003341- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3342 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3343
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003344- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3345 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3346 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3347
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003348- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3349
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003350Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003352
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003353- Added three operators to the operator module:
3354 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3355 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3356 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3357
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003358- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3359
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003360- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3361 archives.
3362
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003363- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3364 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3365 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3366
3367 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3368
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003369- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3370 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3371 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003372 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003373
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003374- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3375 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3376 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3377 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003378 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3379 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3380 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3381 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003382
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003383- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3384 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003385
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003386- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3387
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003388- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3389 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3390
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003391- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3392 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3393 supported.
3394
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003395- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3396
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003397- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3398 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003399
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003400- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3401 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3402
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003403- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3404
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003405- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3406 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3407
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003408- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3409 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3410 functions but callable type objects.
3411
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003412- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003413 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003414 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003415
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003416- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3417 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003418
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003419- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3420 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003421
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003422- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3423 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3424 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3425 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3426
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003427- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3428 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003429
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003430- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3431 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3432 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3433 and __imul__.
3434
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003435- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003436 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3437 is called.
3438
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003439- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3440 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3441 interpreter was compiled.
3442
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003443- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3444 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3445 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003446 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003447 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3448 1, not 2.
3449
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003450- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3451 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3452 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3453 limit.
3454
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003455- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3456 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3457 bug #623464.
3458
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003459- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3460 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3461 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3462 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3463
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003464Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003466
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003467- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3468
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003469- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3470 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3471 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3472 with Python 2.3a2.
3473
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003474- os.path exposes getctime.
3475
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003476- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003477 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003478 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003479 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003480 unit tests of floating point results.
3481
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003482- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3483 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3484 has been increased.
3485
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003486- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3487 executed.
3488
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003489- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3490 postinstallation script.
3491
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003492- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3493 test the current module.
3494
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003495- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003496 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3497 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3498 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3499 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3500
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003501- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003502 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003503 Ward's Optik package.
3504
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003505- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3506 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3507 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3508 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3509
3510- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3511 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003512 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003513
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003514- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3515 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3516 shelf are binary pickles.
3517
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003518- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3519 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3520
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003521- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3522 modules are iterators now.
3523
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003524- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3525 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3526 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3527 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3528 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3529 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003530
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003531- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3532 with their entity value.
3533
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003534- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3535
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003536- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3537 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003538
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003539- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3540 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003541 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003542
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003543- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3544 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3545 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3546 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3547 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3548 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3549 main():
3550
3551 import locale
3552 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3553
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003554- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3555 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3556
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003557- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3558 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3559 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3560 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3561 to the new standard.
3562
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003563- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3564 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3565 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3566 an extension to the database.
3567
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003568- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3569 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3570 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3571 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003572 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003573
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003574- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003575 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003576
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003577- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3578 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3579 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3580 bounded integers.
3581
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003582- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3583 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3584 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3585 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3586 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3587 in existence.
3588
3589 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3590 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3591 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3592 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3593 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3594 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3595
3596 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3597 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3598 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3599 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3600
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003601- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3602 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3603 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3604
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003605- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3606
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003607- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3608 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3609 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3610 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3611
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003612- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3613 argument.
3614
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003615- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3616 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3617 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3618 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3619 [SF patch 560794].
3620
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003621- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3622 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3623 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003624 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3625 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3626 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003627
3628- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3629 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003630
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003631- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3632 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3633 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3634 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003635
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003636- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3637 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3638 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3639 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3640 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3641
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003642- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003643
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003644- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3645
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003646- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3647 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3648 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3649 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3650 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3651 identical to None.
3652
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003653- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3654 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3655 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3656 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3657 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3658 results now.
3659
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003660- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3661 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3662
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003663- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3664 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3665 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3666 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3667 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3668 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3669 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3670 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3671
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003672- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3673
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003674- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3675 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3676
3677- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3678 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3679 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3680 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3681 and other systems.
3682
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003683- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3684 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3685 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3686 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 +00003687 work well with these.
3688
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003689- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3690
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003691- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003692 connections.
3693
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003694- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3695 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3696 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3697
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003698- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3699 sets
3700
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003701- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3702 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3703 name.
3704
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003705- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3706 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3707 passed in.
3708
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003709- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003710 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003711 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3712 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003713
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003714- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3715
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003716- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3717
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003718- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3719 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3720 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3721
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003722- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3723 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3724 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3725 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003726 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003727
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003728- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003729 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003730 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003731
3732- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3733 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3734 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3735
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003736- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003737 the value of its expression argument.
3738
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003739- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3740 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3741 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3742
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003743- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3744 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3745 skipstone browser was included.
3746
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003747- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3748 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3749
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003750Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003752
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003753- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3754 names in addition to accepting file names.
3755
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003756- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3757 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3758 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3759 still used and useful.)
3760
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003761- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3762 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3763 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3764 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003765
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003766- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3767 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3768 the generated binary.
3769
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003770Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003772
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003773- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3774
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003775- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3776 except in the hands of experts.
3777
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003778- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003779 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3780 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3781 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003782
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003783- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3784 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3785 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3786 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3787 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3788 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3789 builds.
3790
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003791- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3792 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3793 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3794 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3795 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3796 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3797 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3798 new type.
3799
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003800- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003801
3802 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3803 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3804 positive infinities.
3805
3806 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3807 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3808 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3809 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3810 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3811 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3812 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3813
3814 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3815
3816 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3817
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003818- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3819 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3820 size of the executable.
3821
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003822- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3823 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3824 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3825 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003826
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003827- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3828
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003829- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3830 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3831 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003832
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003833- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3834 well as Unix.
3835
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003836- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3837 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3838 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3839 modules in the README file for details.
3840
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003841C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003843
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003844- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3845 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003846 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003847 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003848 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003849
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003850- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3851 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3852 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3853 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3854 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3855 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003856 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003857 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3858 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3859 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3860 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3861 aligned.)
3862
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003863- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3864 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3865 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3866
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003867- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3868 level.
3869
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003870- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3871 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3872 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3873 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3874 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3875
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003876- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3877 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3878 code.
3879
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003880- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3881 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3882 adjusting for negative indices.
3883
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003884- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3885 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3886 object.
3887
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003888- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3889 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3890 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3891
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003892- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3893 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003894
3895- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3896
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003897- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3898 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3899 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3900 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3901
3902- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3903
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003904- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003905
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003906- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003907 without going through the buffer API.
3908
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003910
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003911- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3912 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3913 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3914 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3915
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003916- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3917 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3918
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003919- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003920 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3921
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003922New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003924
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003925- OpenVMS is now supported.
3926
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003927- AtheOS is now supported.
3928
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003929- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3930
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003931- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3932
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003933Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934-----
3935
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003936- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3937 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3938 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003939
3940Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003942
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003943- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3944 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3945 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3946 bugs.
3947 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003948 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003949 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3950 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003951 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003952
3953- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003954 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003955
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003956- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3957 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3958
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003959- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3960 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003961 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003962 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3963
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003964- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3965 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3966 use files" uninstall option).
3967
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003968- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3969
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003970- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3971 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3972
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003973- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3974 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3975 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3976
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003977- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3978 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3979 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3980 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3981 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003982 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3983 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3984 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003985
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003986- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003987 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003988 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3989 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3990 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3991 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3992 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3993 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3994 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3995 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3996 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3997 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3998 work around.
3999
4000- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4001 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4002 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4003 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4004 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4005 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4006 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4007 specified with O_CREAT too).
4008
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004009Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010----
4011
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004012- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004013
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004014- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4015 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4016 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4017
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004018- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4019 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4020 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4021
4022- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4023 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4024 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4025 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4026 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4027 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4028 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4029 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004030
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004031- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4032 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4033 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004034
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004035- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4036 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4037 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4038 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4039 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004040
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004041- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4042 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4043 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004044
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004045- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4046 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004047
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004048- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4049 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4050 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4051 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4052 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004053
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004054- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4055 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4056 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4057
4058- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4059 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4060 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004061
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004062- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4063 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4064 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4065 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004066 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004067
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004068- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4069 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004070
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004071- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4072 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004073
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004074- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004075 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004076 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4077 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004078
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004079
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004080What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004081===============================
4082
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4084
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004085Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004087
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004088- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4089 with a custom metaclass.
4090
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004091Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004093
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004094- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4095 are proxies.
4096
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004097Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004099
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004100- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4101 very short strings.
4102
4103- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4104 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4105 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4106 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4107 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4108
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004109Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004111
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004112- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4113 close or delete time).
4114
4115- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4116 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4117
4118- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4119
4120- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004121 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004122
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004123Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004125
4126Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004128
4129C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004131
4132New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004134
4135Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004137
4138Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004140
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004141- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4142
4143- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4144 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4145
4146- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4147 deleted at process exit time.
4148
4149- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4150 in backslash.
4151
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004152Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004154
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004155- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4156 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4157 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4158
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004159
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004160What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004161===========================
4162
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004163*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4164
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004165Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004167
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004168- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4169 been extensively updated. See
4170
4171 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4172
4173 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4174
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004175- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4176 deleted!
4177
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004178- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4179 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4180 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4181 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4182 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4183
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004184- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4185
4186 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4187 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4188
4189 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4190 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4191 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4192 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4193 supported anyway.
4194
4195 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4196 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4197
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004198- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4199 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4200 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4201 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4202 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004203
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004204- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4205 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4206 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4207
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004208Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004209-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004210
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004211- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4212 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4213 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4214 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4215 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4216 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004217 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4218 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4219 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4220 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004221
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004222- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4223 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4224 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4225
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004226Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004227-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004228
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004229- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4230
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004231Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004233
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004234- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4235 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4236 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4237 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4238 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4239 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4240
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004241- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4242
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004243- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4244
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004245- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4246
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004247- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4248 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4249 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4250
4251- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4252
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004253Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004255
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004256- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4257 off a search on Google.
4258
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004259Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004261
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004262- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4263 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4264 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4265 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4266 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4267 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4268 other platforms should do likewise.
4269
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004270- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4271 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4272 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4273
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004274C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004275-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004276
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004277- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4278 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4279 producing key-value pairs.
4280
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004281- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004282 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004283 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4284 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4285 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4286 previously went unchallenged.
4287
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004288New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004290
4291Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004293
4294Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004296
4297Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004299
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004300- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4301 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004302
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004303- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4304 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4305 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4306 home.
4307
4308
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004309What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004310===========================
4311
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4313
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004314Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004316
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004317- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4318 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004319
4320 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004321 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004322
4323 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4324 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004325 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004326 This needs to be documented.
4327
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004328- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4329 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4330
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004331- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4332 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4333 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4334
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004335- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4336 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4337
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004338- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4339 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4340 class forbids it).
4341
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004342- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4343 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4344 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4345
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004346- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4347
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004348Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004350
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004351- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4352 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004353 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004354
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004355- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4356 (like 1 + '').
4357
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004358Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004360
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004361- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4362 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4363 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4364 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004365 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004366 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4367
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004368- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4369 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4370 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4371 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4372
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004373- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4374 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004375 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4376 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4377 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004378
4379- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4380 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004381
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004382- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4383 bytes on its input.
4384
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004385Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004387
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004388- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004389 convenience function.
4390
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004391- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4392 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4393 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004394 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4395 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4396 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4397 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4398 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4399 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004400
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004401- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4402 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4403 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4404 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4405
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004406- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4407 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4408 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4409
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004410- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4411 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4412 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4413 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4414
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004415- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4416 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004418 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4419 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4420 new -l and -e options.
4421
4422- statcache is now deprecated.
4423
4424- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4425 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004427 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4428 time properly taken into account.
4429
4430- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4431 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4432 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4433 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4434
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004435Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004437
4438Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004440
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004441- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4442 is built with libdb3 if available.
4443
4444- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4445
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004446C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004448
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004449- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4450 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4451 PySequence_Size().
4452
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004453- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4454
4455- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4456 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4457 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4458
4459- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4460 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4461
4462- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4463 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4464
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004465New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004467
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004468- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4469 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4470
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004471- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4472 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4473
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004474- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4475
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004476Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004478
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004479- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4480 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4481
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004482Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004484
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004485Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004487
4488- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4489 removed completely in the next release.
4490
4491- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4492 OSX.
4493
4494- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4495 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4496
4497- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004499
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004500What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004501===========================
4502
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4504
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004505Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004507
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004508- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004509 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004510 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004511 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4512 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004513 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4514 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004515 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4516 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004517
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004518- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4519 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4520
4521- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4522 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4523
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004524Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004526
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004527- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4528 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4529 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4530 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4531 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4532 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4533 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4534 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4535
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004536- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4537 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4538 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4539 example).
4540
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004541- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004542 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004543 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004544 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004545
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004546- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4547 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4548 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004549 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004550
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004551- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4552 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4553 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4554 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4555 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4556 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4557
4558 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4559
4560 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4561
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004562Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004564
4565- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4566
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004567- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4568
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004569- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4570 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004571
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004572- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4573 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4574 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4575 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4576 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4577 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004578 attributes.
4579
4580- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4581 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4582 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004583
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004584- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4585 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4586 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004587
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004588- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4589 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4590 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004591 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4592 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4593
4594- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4595 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004596
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004597Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004599
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004600- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4601 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4602
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004603- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4604 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4605 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4606 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4607
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004608- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4609 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4610 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4611 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4612
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004613 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4614 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4615 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4616 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4617 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4618 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4619 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4620 without losing information).
4621
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004622- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004623 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4624 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4625 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4626 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4627 module).
4628
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004629 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004630 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4631 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4632 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4633 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004634
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004635- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004636 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4637 encoding.
4638
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004639- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4640 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4641
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004643 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4644
4645- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4646 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4647 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4648 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4649
4650- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4651
4652- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4653 ON, and OFF.
4654
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004655- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4656 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4657
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004658Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004660
4661- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4662 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4663 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004664
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004665- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4666 been added: -X and -E.
4667
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004668Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004669-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004670
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004671- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4672 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4673
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004674C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004676
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004677- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4678 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4679 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4680 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4681 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4682
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004683- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4684 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4685 as long) arguments.
4686
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004687- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4688 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4689 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4690 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4691 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4692 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4693
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004694- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4695 input.
4696
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004697New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004699
4700Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004702
4703Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004705
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004706- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4707 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4708 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4709
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004710- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4711 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4712 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004713 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004714
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4716 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4717 import signal
4718 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004721 while 1:
4722 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004724 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4725 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4726 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4727 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004728
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004729
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004730What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4731===========================
4732
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4734
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004735Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004737
4738- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4739 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4740 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4741
4742- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4743 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4744 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4745 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4746 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4747 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4748 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004749
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004750- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004751 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004752 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4753 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4754 associate a docstring with a property.
4755
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004756- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4757 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4758 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4759 other built-in object types.
4760
4761- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4762 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4763 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4764 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4765 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4766
4767- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4768 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4769
4770- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4771 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004772 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004773 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4774 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4775 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4776 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4777 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4778
4779- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4780 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4781 class.
4782
4783- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4784 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4785 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4786 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4787
4788- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4789 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4790 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4791 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4792
4793- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4794 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4795
4796- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4797 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4798 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4799 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4800 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004801 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004802 with the same value as s.
4803
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004804- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4805
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004806Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004808
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004809- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4810
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004811- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4812 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4813 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4814 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4815 objects.
4816
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004817- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4818 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004819 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4820 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4821
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004822- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4823 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4824 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4825
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004826Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004827-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004828
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004829- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4830 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4831 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4832 by the instances.
4833
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004834- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4835 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4836 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4837
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004838- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4839 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4840 before the entire comparison is complete.
4841
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004842- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4843 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4844 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4845
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004846- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4847 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4848 getwriter().
4849
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004850- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4851 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4852
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004853- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004854 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4855 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4856
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004857- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4858 iterable object.
4859
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004860- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4861 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004862
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004863- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4864 authentication.
4865
4866- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4867 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004868
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004869- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004870 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4871 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4872 a sample driver.)
4873
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004874Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004875-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004876
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004877- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4878 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4879 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4880 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4881 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4882 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4883 kernel has large file support.
4884
4885- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4886 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4887 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4888 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4889 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4890
4891- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4892 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4893 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4894
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004895C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004896-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004897
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004898- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4899 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4900
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004901New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004902-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004903
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004904- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4905 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4906
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004907Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004909
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004910- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4911 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4912 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4913 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4914 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4915
4916- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4917 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4918 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4919 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4920
4921- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4922 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4923
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004924Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004926
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004927- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004928 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4929 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004930
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004931
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004932What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4933===========================
4934
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004935*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4936
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004937Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004938----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004939
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004940- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4941 big to represent as a C double.
4942
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004943- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4944 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4945 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4946 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4947 restriction).
4948
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004949- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4950 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4951 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4952 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4953 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4954
4955 >>> dir([])
4956 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4957 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4958 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4959 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4960 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4961 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4962 'reverse', 'sort']
4963
4964 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4965
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004966- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004967 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4968 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4969 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4970 OverflowError exception.
4971
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004972- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004973 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004974 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4975 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4976 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4977 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4978 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004979 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4981 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4982
4983 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4984 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4985 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4986 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004987
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004988- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004989 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4990 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4991 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4992 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4993 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4994 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4995 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4996 once it is created.
4997
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004998- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4999 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5000 (key, value) pairs.
5001
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005002- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005003 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5004 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5005
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005006- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5007 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5008 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5009 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5010 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005011
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005012- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005013 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5014 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5015
5016 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5017
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005018- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005019 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5020
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005021Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005022-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005023
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005024- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005025 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5026 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005027
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005028- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5029 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5030 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5031 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5032 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5033 in this area anymore).
5034
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005035- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5036 threading.Timer.
5037
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005038- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5039 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5040
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005041- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005042 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5043
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005044- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005045 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5046 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5047 converted to Python longs.
5048
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005049- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005050 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5051
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005052- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5053 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5054 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5055
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005056Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005057-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005058
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005059- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5060 division operators as per PEP 238.
5061
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005062Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005064
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005065- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5066 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5067 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5068 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5069
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005070C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005072
5073- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005074
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005075- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5076 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005077 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005078
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005079 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5080 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005081 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005082 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005083
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005084- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005085 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5086 module:
5087
5088 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005089
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005090 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5091 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005092
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005093 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5094 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005095
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005096 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5097
5098 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5099
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005100- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005101 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5102 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5103 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005104
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005105New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005106-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005107
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005108- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5109 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5110 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5111 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5112 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005113
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005114Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005116
5117Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005119
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005120- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5121 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5122 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5123 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005124 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5125 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5126 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5127 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5128 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005129
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005130- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005131 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5132
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005133
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005134What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5135===========================
5136
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005137*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5138
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005139Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005140-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005141
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005142- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5143 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5144
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005145- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5146 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5147 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005148
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005149- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5150 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5151 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5152 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005153
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005154- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5155
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005157
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005158Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005159-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005160
5161- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005162 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005163 the module docstring for details.
5164
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005165Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005166-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005167
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005168- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005169 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5170 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5171 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005172
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005173- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5174 Nick Mathewson.
5175
5176Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005178
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005179- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5180 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5181 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5182 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5183 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5184 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5185 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5186 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5187
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005188- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5189 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5190 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5191 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5192
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005193- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5194 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5195 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5196 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5197 come a long way).
5198
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005199- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5200 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5201 write filters for these warnings).
5202
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005203- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5204 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5205 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5206 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5207 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5208
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005209- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5210 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5211 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5212 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5213 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5214 older distribution.
5215
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005216Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005218
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005219- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5220 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005221 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005222
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005223- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5224 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5225 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5226
5227- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5228
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005229- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5230
5231- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5232
5233- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005235- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005236
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005237- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5238
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005239New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005241
5242C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005243-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005244
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005245- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5246 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5247 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5248 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5249 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5250 against buffer overruns.
5251
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005252- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005253 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5254 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005255 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5256 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5257 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5258
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005259- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5260 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5261 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5262 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5263 deprecated.
5264
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005265Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005267
5268- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5269 relevant is found.
5270
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005271
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005272What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005273===========================
5274
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5276
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005277Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005278----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005279
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005280- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5281 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5282 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5283 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5284 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5285 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5286 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5287 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005288 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005289 repaired.
5290
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005291- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005292 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005293 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5294 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5295 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5296 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5297 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5298 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5299 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5300 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5301
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005302- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5303 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5304 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5305 leading BMO character).
5306
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005307- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5308 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5309 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5310
5311 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5312 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5313 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005314
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005315 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5316 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5317 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5318 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5319 for various simple to use conversions.
5320
5321 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5322 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5323
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005324 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5325 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5326 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5327 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5328 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5329 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5330 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5331 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5332 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5333 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5334 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5335 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5336 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5337 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5338 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005339
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005340- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5341 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5342 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005343 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005344 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005345
5346 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005347 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5348 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5349 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5350 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5351 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005352 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5353 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005354
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005355 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5356 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5357 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005358 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005359
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005360- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5361 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5362 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5363 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5364 floating arithmetic,
5365
5366 x = 9007199254740992.0
5367 print long(x)
5368
5369 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5370 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5371 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5372 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5373 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5374 functions are of good quality).
5375
5376 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5377 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5378 algorithms to break.
5379
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005380- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5381 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5382 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5383 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5384 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5385 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5386 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5387 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5388 order.
5389
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005390- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5391 operation along the most common code paths.
5392
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005393- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5394 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5395
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005396- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5397 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5398 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5399 {}.update(UserDict())
5400
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005401- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5402 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5403 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5404 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5405 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5406 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5407 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5408 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5409
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005410- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005411 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005412
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005413 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005414 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5415 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005416 join() method of strings
5417 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005418 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5419 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005420 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005421 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005422
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005423- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5424 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5425
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005426- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5427 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5428
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005429- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5430 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5431 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5432 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5433
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005434- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5435 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005436 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005437 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5438 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005439
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005440- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5441
5442
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005443Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005444-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005445
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005446- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005447 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005448 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5449 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5450
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005451- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5452 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5453
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005454- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5455 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5456 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5457 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5458
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005459- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5460 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5461 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5462
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005463- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5464
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005465- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5466
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005467- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5468 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5469 that are still imported into string.py).
5470
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005471- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5472
5473- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5474 Now it does.
5475
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005476- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5477
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005478- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5479 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5480 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5481 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5482 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005483 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5484 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005485
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005486- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5487 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5488 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5489 'help(object)'.
5490
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005491Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005492-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005493
5494- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005495 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005496 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5497 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5498
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005499- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005500 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5501 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005502
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005503C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005504-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005505
5506- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5507 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005508
5509----
5510
5511**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**