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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000015- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
16 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
17 modified the list.
18
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000019- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
20 functions is now writable.
21
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000022- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
23 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
24 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
25 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
26
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000027- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
28 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
29 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
30 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
31 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000032
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000033- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
34 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
35
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000036Extension modules
37-----------------
38
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000039- Added socket.socketpair().
40
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000041Library
42-------
43
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000044- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
45 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
46 contains symlinks.
47
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000048- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
49 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
50
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000051- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
52 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
53 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
54
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000055- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
56 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
57 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
58 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
59 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
60 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
61 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
62 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
63 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
64 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
65 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
66 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
67 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
68
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000069Tools/Demos
70-----------
71
72Build
73-----
74
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000075- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
76 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
77
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000078C API
79-----
80
81Documentation
82-------------
83
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000084- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +000085symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
86the library reference as well.
87
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000088New platforms
89-------------
90
91Tests
92-----
93
94Windows
95-------
96
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +000097- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
98 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
99 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
100 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
101 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
102 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
103 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
104 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
105 the problem.
106
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000107Mac
108---
109
110
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000111What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
112=================================
113
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000114*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000115
116Core and builtins
117-----------------
118
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000119- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
120 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
121 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
122 sensitive code.
123
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000124- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
125 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
126 @staticmethod
127 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000128 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000129
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000130- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
131 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
132 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
133 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
134 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
135 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
136 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
137 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
138 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
139 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
140 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
141
142 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
143 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
144 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
145 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
146 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
147 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
148 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
149
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000150- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
151 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
152
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000153- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000154 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000155
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000156- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000157 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000158 which was missing for no apparent reason.
159
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000160- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000161 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
162 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
163
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000164- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
165 types that support garbage collection.
166
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000167- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
168
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000169- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
170 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
171 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
172 Jython.
173
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000174- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
175
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000176- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
177 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
178
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000179- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
180 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
181 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000182
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000183- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
184 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
185 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
186
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000187Extension modules
188-----------------
189
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000190- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
191
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000192Library
193-------
194
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000195- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
196 TIS-620
197
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000198- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
199 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
200 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
201 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
202 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
203 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
204 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
205 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
206 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
207 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
208
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000209- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
210
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000211- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
212 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
213 same as when the argument is omitted).
214 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
215
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000216- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
217
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000218- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
219 schemes are offered.
220
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000221- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
222
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000223- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
224 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
225 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
226
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000227- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
228
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000229- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
230 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
231
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000232- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
233 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
234 when dummy_threading is being used.
235
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000236- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
237 from a tarfile.
238
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000239- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000240 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000241
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000242- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
243 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
244 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
245 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
246
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000247- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
248 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
249
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000250- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
251 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
252 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
253 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
254 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
255 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
256 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
257 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
258 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
259 by some other method in progress).
260
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000261- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
262 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
263 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000264
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000265- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
266
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000267- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
268 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
269 AM Kuchling.
270
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000271- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
272 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
273 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
274
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000275- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
276 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
277 instead of unsigned.
278
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000279- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000280 no longer part of the public API.
281
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000282- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
283 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
284 string methods of the same name).
285
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000286- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000287 SF patch 945642.
288
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000289- doctest unittest integration improvements:
290
291 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
292
293 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
294 DocTestSuites.
295
296- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
297 that provide thread-local data.
298
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000299- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
300 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
301
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000302- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
303
304- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
305 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
306 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
307
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000308- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
309
310 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
311 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
312 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000313
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000314 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
315 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
316 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
317 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
318
319 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
320 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
321
322 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
323 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
324 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
325 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
326
327 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
328 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
329 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
330 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
331 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
332
333 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
334 wrapping help output.
335
336 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
337 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
338 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000339
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000340C API
341-----
342
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000343- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
344 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
345 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
346 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
347 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
348 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
349 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
350 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
351 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
352 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
353 its visible semantics have not changed.
354
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000355- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
356 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
357
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000358Documentation
359-------------
360
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000361- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000362
363 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000364 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000365
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000366 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000367
368 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
369
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000370- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000371
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000372Tests
373-----
374
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000375- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000376 platforms that use the Makefile.
377
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000378- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
379 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
380 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
381
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000382
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000383What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
384=================================
385
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000386*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000387
388Core and builtins
389-----------------
390
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000391- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
392 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
393 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
394 objects now (one object instead of three).
395
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000396- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
397 Windows DLLs.
398
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000399- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
400 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000401
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000402- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
403 a new .pyc magic.
404
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000405- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
406 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
407 be there.
408
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000409- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
410 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
411 the LC_NUMERIC category.
412
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000413- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
414 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
415 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
416
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000417- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
418
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000419- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
420 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
421 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000422
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000423- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
424 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
425
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000426- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
427
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000428- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000429 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000430
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000431- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
432
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000433- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
434
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000435- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
436 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
437
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000438- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
439 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
440 Fixes bug #858016 .
441
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000442- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
443 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
444 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
445
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000446- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
447 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
448 improves their performance (about 35%).
449
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000450- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
451 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
452 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
453
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000454- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
455 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
456 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
457 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
458
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000459- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
460 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
461 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
462 length is not known).
463
464- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
465 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000466 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
467 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000468 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
469
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000470- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
471 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
472
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000473- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
474 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
475 keyword arguments.
476
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000477- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
478 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
479 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
480
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000481- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
482 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
483 cases.
484
485- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
486 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
487 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
488 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
489 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
490 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
491 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
492 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
493 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
494 a release build.
495
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000496- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
497 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
498
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000499- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000500 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000501
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000502- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
503 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
504 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
505 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
506 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
507 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
508 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
509 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
510 destroyed.
511
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000512- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
513 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
514 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
515 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
516 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
517 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
518 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
519 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
520
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000521- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
522 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
523 character other than a space.
524
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000525- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
526 by the function object or by the method object, the function
527 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
528 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
529 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
530 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
531 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
532 attributes with the same name.
533
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000534- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
535 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
536 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
537 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
538 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
539 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
540 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
541 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
542 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
543 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
544 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
545 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
546 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
547 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000548
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000549- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
550 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
551 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
552 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
553 This has been repaired.
554
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000555- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
556
557- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
558
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000559- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
560 over a sequence.
561
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000562- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000563 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000564
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000565- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
566
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000567- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
568 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
569 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
570 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
571 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
572 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
573 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
574 records with equal keys is unchanged).
575
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000576- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
577 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
578 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
579
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000580- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
581 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
582 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
583 freelist.
584
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000585- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
586 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
587
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000588- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
589 number.
590
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000591- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
592 a TypeError exception.
593
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000594- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
595 820195.
596
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000597- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
598 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
599 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
600
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000601- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000602 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
603 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000604
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000605- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
606 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
607 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
608
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000609- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
610 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000611 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000612
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000613- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000614 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
615 the first call.
616
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000617
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000618Extension modules
619-----------------
620
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000621- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
622 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
623
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000624- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
625 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
626 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
627 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
628 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
629 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
630 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000631
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000632- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
633
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000634- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
635
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000636- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
637 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
638
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000639- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
640 fewer false positives.
641
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000642- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
643 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
644
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000645- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000646 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
647
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000648- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000649 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000650 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
651 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
652 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000653
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000654- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
655 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
656 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
657 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
658
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000659- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
660 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
661 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
662 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
663 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
664 #897625.
665
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000666- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
667 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
668
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000669- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
670 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
671 and pops on either side of the deque.
672
673- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
674 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
675
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000676- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
677 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
678 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
679 other functions that expect a function argument.
680
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000681- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
682
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000683- os.getsid was added.
684
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000685- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
686 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
687 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
688
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000689- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
690
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000691- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
692
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000693- readline.clear_history was added.
694
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000695- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
696
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000697- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
698
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000699- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
700
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000701- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
702
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000703- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
704
705- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
706
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000707- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
708
709- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
710
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000711- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
712 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
713 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
714
715- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
716 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
717 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
718 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
719 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
720 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
721 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
722
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000723- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
724 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
725 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
726 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000727
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000728- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000729 iterators from a single iterable.
730
731- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
732 of raising a TypeError exception.
733
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000734- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
735 as parameter.
736
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000737Library
738-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000739
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000740- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
741 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
742 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000743
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000744- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
745 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
746 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000747
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000748- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000749
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000750- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
751 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000752
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000753- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
754 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
755
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000756- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
757
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000758- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000759 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000760
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000761- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
762 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
763
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000764- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
765
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000766- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
767 on cygwin and mingw32.
768
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000769- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
770
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000771- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
772 module.
773
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000774- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
775 installation scheme for all platforms.
776
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000777- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000778 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000779
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000780- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
781 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
782 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
783
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000784- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
785 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
786 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
787
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000788- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
789
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000790- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
791
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000792- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
793 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
794
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000795- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
796 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
797 type pattern with the same value exists.
798
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000799- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
800 when run from the command prompt).
801
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000802- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
803 not taken into consideration when caching value.
804
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000805- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
806 default sort).
807
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000808- Added global runctx function to profile module
809
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000810- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
811
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000812- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
813
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000814- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
815
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000816- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000817 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
818 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
819 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
820 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
821 accordingly.
822
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000823- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
824 decoding standards.
825
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000826- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
827 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
828 called for all requests.
829
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000830- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
831 they are passed to the compiler.
832
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000833- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
834 indent, width and depth.
835
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000836- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
837 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
838
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000839- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
840 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
841
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000842- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
843
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000844- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
845
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000846- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
847
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000848- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
849 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
850
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000851- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000852 for better performance.
853
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000854- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000855
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000856- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
857 a string).
858
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000859- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
860
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000861- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
862
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000863- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
864
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000865- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
866
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000867- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
868 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
869 list of fieldnames.
870
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000871- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
872 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
873
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000874- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
875
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000876- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
877 empty lists.
878
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000879- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
880 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
881 and shelves.
882
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000883- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
884 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
885
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000886- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000887 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
888 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000889
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000890- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
891 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000892 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000893
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000894- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000895 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
896 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
897
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000898- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
899 and removed in Py2.4.
900
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000901- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
902
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000903- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
904
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000905Tools/Demos
906-----------
907
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000908- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
909 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
910
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000911- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
912
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000913- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
914 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
915 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
916 destination in situations where both files are given.
917
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000918- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
919 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
920 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
921 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
922
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000923- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
924
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000925- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
926 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
927 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
928 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
929 now.
930
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000931- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
932 in effect
933
934- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
935 C-c C-h
936
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000937- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
938 -d option was given.
939
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000940Build
941-----
942
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000943- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
944 build under OS X.
945
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000946- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
947 --enable-profiling.
948
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000949- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
950 is configured --with-tsc.
951
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000952- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
953 on AMD64.
954
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000955- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
956 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
957
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000958- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
959 removed.
960
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000961- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
962 supported (see PEP 11).
963
964- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
965
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000966- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
967
968- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
969 (see PEP 11).
970
971- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
972 sizeof(char) must be 1.
973
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000974C API
975-----
976
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000977- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
978 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
979 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
980
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000981- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
982 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
983 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
984 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
985
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000986- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
987 generator objects.
988
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000989- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
990 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000991 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
992 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000993
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000994- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
995 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
996
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000997- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
998 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
999 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1000 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1001 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1002
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001003- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1004 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1005 about 10% faster.
1006
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001007- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1008 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1009
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001010- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1011 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1012 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1013 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1014
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001015Windows
1016-------
1017
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001018- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1019 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1020 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1021 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1022
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001023- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1024 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1025 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1026
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001027
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001028What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1029===============================
1030
1031*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1032
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001033IDLE
1034----
1035
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001036- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1037 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1038 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1039 context-menu actions.
1040
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001041- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1042 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1043 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1044 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1045 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1046 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1047 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1048 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1049 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1050
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001051
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001052What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1053=============================================
1054
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001055*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001056
1057Core and builtins
1058-----------------
1059
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001060- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001061 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001062 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1063
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001064Extension modules
1065-----------------
1066
1067- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1068 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1069 than once. This has been fixed.
1070
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001071- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1072 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1073 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1074 call.
1075
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001076- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1077
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001078Library
1079-------
1080
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001081- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1082 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1083
1084- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1085 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1086 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1087 restored.
1088
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001089IDLE
1090----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001091
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001092- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001093
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001094Build
1095-----
1096
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001097- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1098 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1099
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001100C API
1101-----
1102
1103Windows
1104-------
1105
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001106- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1107 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1108
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001109- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1110
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001111Mac
1112---
1113
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001114- Various fixes to pimp.
1115
1116- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1117
1118- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1119 more problems than it solves.
1120
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001121
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001122What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1123=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001124
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001125*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1126
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001127Core and builtins
1128-----------------
1129
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001130- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1131 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1132
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001133- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1134 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001135 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001136
1137- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1138 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1139 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001140 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001141
1142- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1143 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001144
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001145- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1146 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1147 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1148
1149- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001150 770247.
1151
1152- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001153
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001154Extension modules
1155-----------------
1156
1157- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1158 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1159
1160- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1161
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001162- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1163
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001164- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1165 contained within the _strptime module.
1166
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001167- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1168 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1169
1170- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001171 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1172
1173- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1174 the find_class attribute, if present.
1175
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001176- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001177
1178 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1179 (SF bug 763298).
1180
1181 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001182 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1183 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1184 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001185
1186 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1187
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001188Library
1189-------
1190
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001191- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1192
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001193- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1194 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1195 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1196 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1197 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1198 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1199 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1200 or Tester().
1201
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001202- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1203 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1204 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1205 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1206 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1207 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1208 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1209 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1210 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001211
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001212 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001213
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001214- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1215 weren't before was an oversight.
1216
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001217- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1218 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1219
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001220- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1221 when there are no lines.
1222
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001223- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1224 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1225
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001226- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1227 to child processes.
1228
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001229- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1230
1231- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1232
1233- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1234 xmlrpclib.
1235
1236- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1237 responses.
1238
1239- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1240 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1241
1242- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1243 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1244 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1245
1246- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1247 used as patterns.
1248
1249- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1250 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1251 than Tk 8.3.
1252
1253- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1254
1255- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001256
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001257Tools/Demos
1258-----------
1259
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001260- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1261
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001262- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1263
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001264- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001265
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001266Build
1267-----
1268
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001269- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1270
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001271- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1272
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001273- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1274 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001275
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001276- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1277 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1278 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001279
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001280C API
1281-----
1282
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001283- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1284 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1285
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001286Windows
1287-------
1288
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001289- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1290 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1291 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1292 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1293 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1294 Python exception ::
1295
1296 thread.error: can't start new thread
1297
1298 is raised now.
1299
1300- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1301 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1302 instead of from DLL teardown.
1303
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001304Mac
1305---
1306
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001307- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001308 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001309 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1310 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1311 the executable in the bundle.
1312
1313- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001314
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001315- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1316
1317- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1318 on Panther.
1319
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001320What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1321================================
1322
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001323*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001324
1325Core and builtins
1326-----------------
1327
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001328- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1329 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1330 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1331 with the -i option.
1332
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001333- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1334 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1335
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001336- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1337 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1338
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001339- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1340 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1341 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1342 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1343 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1344 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1345 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1346 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1347 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1348 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1349 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1350 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1351 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001352
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001353- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1354 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1355 embedded in a lambda expression.
1356
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001357- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1358 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1359 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1360 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1361 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1362
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001363- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1364 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1365 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1366
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001367- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1368 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1369
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001370- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1371 It's writable again.
1372
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001373- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1374 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1375 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001376 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001377
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001378- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1379 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1380 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1381
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001382Extension modules
1383-----------------
1384
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001385- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1386 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1387
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001388- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1389 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1390 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1391 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1392
1393- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1394 collection.
1395
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001396- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1397 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1398 unique within a single program run.
1399
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001400- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1401 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1402
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001403- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1404 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1405
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001406- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1407 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001408
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001409- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1410
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001411- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1412 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1413
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001414- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1415 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1416 for many BSD-derived systems.
1417
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001418
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001419Library
1420-------
1421
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001422- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1423 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1424 primary ones:
1425
1426 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1427 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1428 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1429
1430 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1431 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1432 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1433 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1434 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1435 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1436
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001437- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1438 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1439 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1440 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1441 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1442 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1443 argument.
1444
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001445- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1446 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1447 in the archive.
1448
1449- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1450 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1451
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001452- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1453 569574).
1454
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001455- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1456 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1457 no more.
1458
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001459- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1460 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1461 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1462 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1463 code coverage.
1464
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001465- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1466 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1467 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001468 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1469 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001470
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001471- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1472 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1473 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001474 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001475
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001476- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1477
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001478- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1479 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1480 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1481 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1482
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001483- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1484 handling.
1485
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001486- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1487 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1488
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001489- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1490 in socket.py.
1491
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001492- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1493
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001494- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1495 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1496 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1497 opener with proxy support.
1498
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001499- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1500
1501- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1502
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001503Tools/Demos
1504-----------
1505
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001506- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1507
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001508- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1509
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001510- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1511 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001512
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001513- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1514 files.
1515
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001516Build
1517-----
1518
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001519- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001520 different root directory.
1521
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001522C API
1523-----
1524
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001525- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1526 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1527 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1528 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1529 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1530 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1531 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1532 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1533 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1534 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1535
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001536- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1537 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1538 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1539 from Python.
1540
1541
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001542New platforms
1543-------------
1544
1545None this time.
1546
1547Tests
1548-----
1549
1550- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1551 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1552
1553Windows
1554-------
1555
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001556- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1557
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001558- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1559 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1560 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1561 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1562 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1563 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1564 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1565 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1566 that's what it's for.
1567
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001568Mac
1569---
1570
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001571- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1572 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1573 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1574 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001575- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1576 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1577- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001578
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001579SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1580------------------------------------
1581
1582430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1583598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1584622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1585661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1586683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1587697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1588713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1589724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1590727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1591729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1592730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1593731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1594732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1595733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1596735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1597740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1598744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1599745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1600747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1601749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1602751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1603753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1604755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1605757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1606760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1607
1608
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001609What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1610================================
1611
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001612*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001613
1614Core and builtins
1615-----------------
1616
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001617- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1618 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1619
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001620- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1621 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1622 and cannot be strings).
1623
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001624- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1625 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1626 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1627 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1628
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001629- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1630 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1631 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1632 Python itself.
1633
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001634- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1635 the referenced object, if it has one.
1636
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001637- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1638 the thread started at
1639 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1640
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001641- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1642 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1643 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1644 placed on a list index.
1645
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001646- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1647 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1648 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1649 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1650
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001651- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1652 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1653 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1654 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1655 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1656 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1657 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1658
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001659- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1660 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1661 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1662 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1663 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1664
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001665- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1666 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001667
1668- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1669 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1670 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1671 #693195.)
1672
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001673- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1674 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001675
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001676- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001677 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001678 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1679 interpreter executions, would fail.
1680
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001681- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001682 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001683 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001684
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001685Extension modules
1686-----------------
1687
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001688- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1689 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1690 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1691 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1692
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001693- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1694 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1695
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001696- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1697 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1698 and Greg Chapman.)
1699
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001700- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1701 recursively.
1702
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001703- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001704 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1705 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1706 leaks.
1707
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001708- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1709
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001710- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1711 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1712 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1713 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1714 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1715 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1716 #705836.
1717
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001718- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001719 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1720
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001721- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1722 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1723 See SF bug #692416.
1724
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001725- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1726 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1727
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001728- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1729 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1730 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001731
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001732- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001733 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1734 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1735
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001736- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1737 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1738 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1739 timeouts to work properly.
1740
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001741Library
1742-------
1743
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001744- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1745 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1746 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1747 future release.
1748
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001749- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1750 for querying platform dependent features.
1751
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001752- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001753
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001754- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1755 pickle protocol versions.
1756
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001757- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1758 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1759 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1760
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001761- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1762
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001763- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1764 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1765 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1766 modules.
1767
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001768- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1769 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1770 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1771
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001772- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1773 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1774
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001775- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1776 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1777 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1778
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001779- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001780 MS Office extensions.
1781
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001782- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1783 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1784
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001785- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1786 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1787
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001788- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1789 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1790 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1791 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1792 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1793 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1794
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001795- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1796 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1797 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001798
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001799- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1800 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1801 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1802
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001803- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1804
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001805- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1806 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1807 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1808
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001809Tools/Demos
1810-----------
1811
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001812- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1813 See the module docstring for details.
1814
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001815Build
1816-----
1817
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001818- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1819 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001820
1821C API
1822-----
1823
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001824- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1825
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001826- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1827 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1828 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1829
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001830- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1831 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001832
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001833 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1834 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1835 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001836
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001837- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001838 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1839
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001840- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1841 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1842 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001843
1844New platforms
1845-------------
1846
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001847None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001848
1849Tests
1850-----
1851
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001852- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1853 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001854
1855Windows
1856-------
1857
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001858- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1859 function.
1860
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001861- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1862 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001863
1864Mac
1865---
1866
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001867- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1868 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001869
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001870- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1871 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001872
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001873- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1874 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1875 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001876
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001877- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001878 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1879 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001880
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001881- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1882 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001883
1884
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001885What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1886=================================
1887
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001888*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001889
1890Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001891-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001892
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001893- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1894 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1895 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1896
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001897- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1898 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1899 (SF patch #664376.)
1900
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001901- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1902 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1903 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1904 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1905 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1906 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001907 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001908
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001909- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1910 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1911 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1912 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001913 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001914
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001915- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1916 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1917 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1918 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1919 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1920 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1921 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1922 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1923 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1924 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1925 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1926
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001927- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1928 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1929 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1930 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1931 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1932 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1933
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001934- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1935 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1936
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001937- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1938 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1939 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1940 case.)
1941
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001942- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1943 passed as unicode strings.
1944
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001945- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1946 See SF bug #683467.
1947
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001948- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1949 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1950
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001951- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1952
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001953- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1954
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001955- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1956 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1957 arguments.
1958
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001959- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1960 See SF bug #667147.
1961
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001962- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001963 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001964 See SF bug #676155.
1965
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001966- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001967 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001968 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1969 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1970 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1971 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1972 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1973 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001974
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001975Extension modules
1976-----------------
1977
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001978- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1979 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1980 tp_as_number pointer.
1981
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001982- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1983 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1984 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1985 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1986 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1987
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001988- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1989
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001990- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1991
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001992- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001993 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001994 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1995 patch #678531.)
1996
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001997- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1998 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1999
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002000- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2001 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2002
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002003- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2004
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002005- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2006 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2007 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2008
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002009- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2010
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002011- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2012 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2013
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002014- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002015
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002016- datetime changes:
2017
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002018 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2019
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002020 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2021 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2022 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2023 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2024 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2025 now.
2026
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002027 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002028 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2029 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002030
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002031 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002032 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002033 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2034 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2035 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2036 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002037
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002038 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2039 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2040 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002041 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2042
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002043 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2044 by a later example coded by Guido.
2045
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002046 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002047 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2048 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2049 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002050 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2051 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2052
2053 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2054 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2055 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2056 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2057 tzinfo subclass instance.
2058
2059 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2060 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2061 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2062 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2063 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2064 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2065 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2066 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002067
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002068 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2069 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2070 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2071 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2072 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002073 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2074
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002075 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002076
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002077 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2078 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2079 as a naive datetime object.
2080
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002081 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2082 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2083 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2084
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002085 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2086 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2087 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2088 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2089 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2090 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2091 comparison.
2092
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002093 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2094 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2095 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2096 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002097 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002098
2099 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002100
2101 and ::
2102
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002103 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2104
2105 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2106 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2107 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2108 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2109
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002110 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2111 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2112 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2113 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2114 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2115
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002116 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2117 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002118 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2119 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002120
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002121Library
2122-------
2123
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002124- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2125 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2126
2127- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2128 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2129 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2130 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2131 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2132 See PEP 307 for details.
2133
2134- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2135 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2136
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002137- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2138 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002139 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002140 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2141 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002142 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002143
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002144- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2145 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2146
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002147- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2148 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2149 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2150
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002151- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2152
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002153- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2154 exception.
2155
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002156- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2157 class.
2158
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002159- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2160 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2161 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2162
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002163- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2164 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2165
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002166- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002167 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2168 See SF bug #659228.
2169
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002170- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2171 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2172 See SF patch #651082.
2173
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002174- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002175
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002176- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2177 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2178
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002179- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002180 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002181
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002182- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2183 DOS paths from other platforms.
2184
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002185Tools/Demos
2186-----------
2187
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002188- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2189 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2190 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2191 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2192 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2193 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2194 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2195 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2196 example:
2197
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002198 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2199 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002200
2201 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2202
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002204Build
2205-----
2206
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002207- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2208 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2209 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002210 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2211
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002212 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2213
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002214- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2215 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2216 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2217 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2218 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2219 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2220 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2221 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2222 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2223
2224- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2225 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2226 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2227 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2228
2229- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2230 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2231
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002232C API
2233-----
2234
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002235- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2236 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002237
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002238- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2239 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2240 tp_as_number pointer.
2241
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002242- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2243 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2244 (SF #681367)
2245
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002246- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2247 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2248 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2249 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002250
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002251Tests
2252-----
2253
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002254- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002255 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2256 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2257 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2258 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2259 pydoc.)
2260
2261- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2262
2263- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002264
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002265Windows
2266-------
2267
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002268- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2269 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2270 time).
2271
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002272- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2273 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2274
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002275- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2276 release without strong cryptography.
2277
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002278- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002279 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002280
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002281- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2282 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2283
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002284Mac
2285---
2286
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002287- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2288 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002289
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002290- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2291 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2292 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002293
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002294- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2295 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002296
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002297- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2298 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2299 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2300 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002301
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002302- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002303 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2304 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2305 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002306
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002307
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002308What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002309=================================
2310
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002311*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002312
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002313Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002314--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002315
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002316- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2317
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002318- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2319 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002320 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002321 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002322 a different meaning than before.
2323
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002324- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002325 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002326 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002327
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002328- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002329 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002330 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002331
2332- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2333 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2334 and deallocation.
2335
2336- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2337 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2338
2339- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2340 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2341 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2342 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2343 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2344
2345- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2346 now detected by the garbage collector.
2347
2348- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2349 [SF bug 519621]
2350
2351- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2352 identifier.
2353
2354- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2355 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2356 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2357 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2358 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2359 [SF bug 563060]
2360
2361- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2362 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2363 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2364 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2365 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2366
2367- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2368 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2369 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2370
2371- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2372
2373- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2374 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2375 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2376 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2377 state of the slots would be lost.)
2378
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002379Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002380-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002381
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002382- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002383 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2384 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2385 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2386 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002387 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2388 Jython 2.1.
2389
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002390- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002391 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002392 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2393 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2394 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2395 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2396 these, see PEP 302.
2397
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002398- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2399 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2400 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2401
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002402- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2403 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2404 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2405
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002406- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2407 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2408 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2409
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002410- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2411 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2412 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2413 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2414 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2415 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2416 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2417 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2418 releases or implementations.
2419
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002420- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002421 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2422 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002423
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002424- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2425 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2426
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002427- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2428 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2429 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2430
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002431- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2432 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2433
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002434- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2435 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002436 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2437 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002438
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002439- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2440 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2441 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2442 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2443 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2444
2445 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2446 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2447 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2448 pattern.
2449
2450 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2451 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2452 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2453 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2454
2455 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2456 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2457 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2458 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2459 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2460 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2461
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002462- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2463 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2464 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2465 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2466 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2467 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2468 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2469 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002470
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002471- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2472 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2473 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2474 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2475 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002476 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2477 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2478 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2479 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2480 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2481 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2482 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002483
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002484- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2485 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2486
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002487- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2488 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2489 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2490 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2491 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2492 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2493 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2494 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2495 to Zack Weinberg!
2496
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002497- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2498 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2499 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2500 type. This has been fixed now.
2501
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002502- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2503 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2504 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2505
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002506- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2507 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2508 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2509 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2510 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2511 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2512 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2513 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002514 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002515
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002516- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2517 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2518 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002519
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002520- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2521 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2522 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2523 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2524 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2525 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2526 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2527 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002528 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002529 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2530 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2531
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002532- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2533 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2534 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2535 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2536 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2537 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2538 this.)
2539
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002540- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2541 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002542 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002543 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002544 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2545 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002546 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2547 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002548
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002549- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2550 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2551 currently running.
2552
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002553- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2554 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2555 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2556 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2557
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002558- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2559 as directory names.
2560
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002561- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2562 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2563
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002564- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2565 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2566
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002567- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002568 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2569 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002570
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002571- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2572 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2573 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2574 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2575 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2576
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002577- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2578 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2579 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2580 removed.
2581
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002582- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2583 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2584 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2585
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002586- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2587 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2588 to __debug__.
2589
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002590- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2591 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2592 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2593
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002594- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2595 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2596 deprecated now.
2597
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002598- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2599 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2600 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002601
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002602- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2603 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2604 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2605 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2606 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002607
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002608- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2609 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2610
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002611- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2612 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2613 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002614 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002615 is backward compatible.
2616
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002617- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2618 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2619 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2620 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2621 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2622
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002623- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2624 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2625 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2626 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2627 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2628 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002629
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002630- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2631 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2632
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002633- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2634 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2635
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002636- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2637 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2638 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2639 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2640 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2641
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002642- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2643 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2644 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2645
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002646- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002647 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2648
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002649- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2650 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2651 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002652
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002653- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2654 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2655
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002656- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2657 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2658 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2659
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002660- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2661
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002662Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002663-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002664
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002665- Added three operators to the operator module:
2666 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2667 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2668 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2669
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002670- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2671
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002672- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2673 archives.
2674
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002675- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2676 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2677 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2678
2679 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2680
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002681- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2682 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2683 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002684 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002685
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002686- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2687 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2688 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2689 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002690 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2691 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2692 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2693 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002694
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002695- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2696 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002697
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002698- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2699
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002700- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2701 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2702
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002703- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2704 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2705 supported.
2706
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002707- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2708
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002709- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2710 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002711
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002712- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2713 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2714
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002715- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2716
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002717- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2718 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2719
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002720- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2721 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2722 functions but callable type objects.
2723
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002724- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002725 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002726 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002727
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002728- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2729 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002730
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002731- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2732 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002733
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002734- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2735 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2736 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2737 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2738
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002739- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2740 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002741
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002742- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2743 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2744 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2745 and __imul__.
2746
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002747- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002748 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2749 is called.
2750
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002751- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2752 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2753 interpreter was compiled.
2754
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002755- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2756 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2757 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002758 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002759 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2760 1, not 2.
2761
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002762- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2763 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2764 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2765 limit.
2766
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002767- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2768 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2769 bug #623464.
2770
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002771- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2772 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2773 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2774 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2775
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002776Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002777-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002778
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002779- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2780
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002781- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2782 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2783 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2784 with Python 2.3a2.
2785
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002786- os.path exposes getctime.
2787
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002788- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002789 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002790 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002791 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002792 unit tests of floating point results.
2793
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002794- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2795 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2796 has been increased.
2797
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002798- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2799 executed.
2800
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002801- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2802 postinstallation script.
2803
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002804- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2805 test the current module.
2806
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002807- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002808 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2809 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2810 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2811 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2812
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002813- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002814 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002815 Ward's Optik package.
2816
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002817- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2818 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2819 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2820 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2821
2822- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2823 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002824 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002825
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002826- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2827 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2828 shelf are binary pickles.
2829
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002830- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2831 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2832
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002833- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2834 modules are iterators now.
2835
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002836- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2837 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2838 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2839 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2840 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2841 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002842
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002843- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2844 with their entity value.
2845
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002846- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2847
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002848- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2849 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002850
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002851- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2852 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002853 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002854
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002855- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2856 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2857 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2858 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2859 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2860 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2861 main():
2862
2863 import locale
2864 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2865
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002866- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2867 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2868
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002869- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2870 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2871 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2872 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2873 to the new standard.
2874
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002875- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2876 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2877 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2878 an extension to the database.
2879
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002880- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2881 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2882 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2883 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002884 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002885
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002886- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002887 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002888
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002889- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2890 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2891 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2892 bounded integers.
2893
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002894- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2895 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2896 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2897 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2898 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2899 in existence.
2900
2901 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2902 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2903 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2904 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2905 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2906 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2907
2908 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2909 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2910 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2911 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2912
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002913- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2914 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2915 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2916
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002917- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2918
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002919- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2920 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2921 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2922 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2923
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002924- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2925 argument.
2926
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002927- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2928 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2929 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2930 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2931 [SF patch 560794].
2932
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002933- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2934 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2935 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002936 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2937 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2938 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002939
2940- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2941 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002942
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002943- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2944 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2945 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2946 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002947
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002948- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2949 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2950 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2951 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2952 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2953
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002954- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002955
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002956- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2957
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002958- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2959 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2960 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2961 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2962 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2963 identical to None.
2964
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002965- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2966 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2967 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2968 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2969 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2970 results now.
2971
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002972- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2973 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2974
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002975- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2976 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2977 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2978 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2979 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2980 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2981 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2982 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2983
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002984- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2985
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002986- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2987 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2988
2989- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2990 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2991 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2992 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2993 and other systems.
2994
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002995- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2996 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2997 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2998 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 +00002999 work well with these.
3000
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003001- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3002
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003003- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003004 connections.
3005
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003006- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3007 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3008 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3009
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003010- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3011 sets
3012
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003013- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3014 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3015 name.
3016
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003017- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3018 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3019 passed in.
3020
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003021- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003022 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003023 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3024 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003025
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003026- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3027
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003028- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3029
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003030- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3031 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3032 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3033
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003034- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3035 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3036 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3037 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003038 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003039
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003040- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003041 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003042 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003043
3044- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3045 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3046 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3047
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003048- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003049 the value of its expression argument.
3050
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003051- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3052 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3053 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3054
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003055- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3056 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3057 skipstone browser was included.
3058
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003059- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3060 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3061
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003062Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003064
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003065- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3066 names in addition to accepting file names.
3067
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003068- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3069 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3070 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3071 still used and useful.)
3072
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003073- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3074 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3075 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3076 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003077
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003078- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3079 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3080 the generated binary.
3081
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003082Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003084
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003085- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3086
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003087- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3088 except in the hands of experts.
3089
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003090- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003091 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3092 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3093 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003094
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003095- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3096 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3097 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3098 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3099 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3100 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3101 builds.
3102
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003103- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3104 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3105 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3106 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3107 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3108 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3109 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3110 new type.
3111
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003112- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003113
3114 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3115 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3116 positive infinities.
3117
3118 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3119 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3120 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3121 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3122 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3123 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3124 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3125
3126 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3127
3128 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3129
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003130- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3131 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3132 size of the executable.
3133
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003134- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3135 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3136 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3137 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003138
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003139- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3140
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003141- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3142 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3143 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003144
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003145- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3146 well as Unix.
3147
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003148- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3149 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3150 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3151 modules in the README file for details.
3152
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003153C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003155
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003156- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3157 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003158 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003159 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003160 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003161
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003162- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3163 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3164 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3165 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3166 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3167 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003168 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003169 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3170 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3171 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3172 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3173 aligned.)
3174
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003175- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3176 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3177 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3178
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003179- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3180 level.
3181
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003182- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3183 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3184 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3185 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3186 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3187
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003188- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3189 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3190 code.
3191
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003192- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3193 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3194 adjusting for negative indices.
3195
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003196- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3197 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3198 object.
3199
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003200- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3201 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3202 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3203
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003204- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3205 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003206
3207- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3208
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003209- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3210 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3211 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3212 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3213
3214- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3215
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003216- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003217
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003218- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003219 without going through the buffer API.
3220
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003221- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003222
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003223- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3224 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3225 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3226 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3227
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003228- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3229 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3230
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003231- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003232 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3233
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003234New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003236
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003237- OpenVMS is now supported.
3238
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003239- AtheOS is now supported.
3240
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003241- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3242
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003243- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3244
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003245Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246-----
3247
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003248- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3249 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3250 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003251
3252Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003253-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003254
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003255- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3256 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3257 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3258 bugs.
3259 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003260 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003261 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3262 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003263 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003264
3265- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003266 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003267
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003268- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3269 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3270
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003271- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3272 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003273 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003274 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3275
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003276- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3277 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3278 use files" uninstall option).
3279
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003280- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3281
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003282- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3283 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3284
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003285- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3286 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3287 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3288
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003289- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3290 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3291 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3292 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3293 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003294 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3295 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3296 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003297
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003298- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003299 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003300 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3301 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3302 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3303 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3304 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3305 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3306 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3307 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3308 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3309 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3310 work around.
3311
3312- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3313 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3314 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3315 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3316 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3317 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3318 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3319 specified with O_CREAT too).
3320
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003321Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322----
3323
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003324- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003325
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003326- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3327 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3328 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3329
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003330- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3331 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3332 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3333
3334- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3335 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3336 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3337 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3338 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3339 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3340 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3341 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003342
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003343- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3344 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3345 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003346
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003347- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3348 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3349 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3350 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3351 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003352
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003353- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3354 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3355 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003356
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003357- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3358 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003359
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003360- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3361 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3362 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3363 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3364 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003365
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003366- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3367 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3368 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3369
3370- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3371 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3372 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003373
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003374- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3375 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3376 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3377 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003378 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003379
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003380- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3381 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003382
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003383- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3384 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003385
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003386- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003387 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003388 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3389 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003390
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003391
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003392What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003393===============================
3394
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3396
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003397Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003398--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003399
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003400- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3401 with a custom metaclass.
3402
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003403Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003405
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003406- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3407 are proxies.
3408
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003409Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003411
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003412- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3413 very short strings.
3414
3415- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3416 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3417 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3418 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3419 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3420
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003421Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003423
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003424- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3425 close or delete time).
3426
3427- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3428 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3429
3430- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3431
3432- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003433 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003434
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003435Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003436-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003437
3438Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003440
3441C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003442-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003443
3444New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003446
3447Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003448-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003449
3450Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003452
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003453- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3454
3455- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3456 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3457
3458- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3459 deleted at process exit time.
3460
3461- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3462 in backslash.
3463
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003464Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003466
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003467- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3468 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3469 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3470
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003471
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003472What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003473===========================
3474
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003475*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3476
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003477Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003479
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003480- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3481 been extensively updated. See
3482
3483 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3484
3485 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3486
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003487- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3488 deleted!
3489
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003490- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3491 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3492 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3493 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3494 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3495
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003496- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3497
3498 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3499 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3500
3501 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3502 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3503 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3504 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3505 supported anyway.
3506
3507 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3508 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3509
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003510- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3511 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3512 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3513 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3514 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003515
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003516- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3517 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3518 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3519
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003520Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003521-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003522
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003523- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3524 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3525 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3526 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3527 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3528 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003529 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3530 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3531 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3532 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003533
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003534- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3535 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3536 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3537
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003538Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003540
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003541- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3542
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003543Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003545
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003546- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3547 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3548 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3549 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3550 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3551 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3552
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003553- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3554
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003555- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3556
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003557- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3558
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003559- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3560 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3561 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3562
3563- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3564
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003565Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003567
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003568- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3569 off a search on Google.
3570
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003571Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003572-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003573
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003574- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3575 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3576 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3577 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3578 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3579 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3580 other platforms should do likewise.
3581
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003582- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3583 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3584 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3585
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003586C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003588
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003589- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3590 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3591 producing key-value pairs.
3592
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003593- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003594 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003595 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3596 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3597 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3598 previously went unchallenged.
3599
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003600New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003602
3603Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003605
3606Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003608
3609Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003611
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003612- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3613 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003614
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003615- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3616 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3617 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3618 home.
3619
3620
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003621What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003622===========================
3623
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3625
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003626Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003628
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003629- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3630 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003631
3632 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003633 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003634
3635 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3636 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003637 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003638 This needs to be documented.
3639
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003640- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3641 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3642
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003643- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3644 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3645 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3646
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003647- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3648 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3649
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003650- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3651 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3652 class forbids it).
3653
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003654- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3655 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3656 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3657
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003658- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3659
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003660Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003661-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003662
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003663- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3664 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003665 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003666
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003667- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3668 (like 1 + '').
3669
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003670Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003672
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003673- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3674 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3675 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3676 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003677 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003678 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3679
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003680- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3681 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3682 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3683 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3684
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003685- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3686 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003687 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3688 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3689 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003690
3691- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3692 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003693
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003694- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3695 bytes on its input.
3696
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003697Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003698-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003699
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003700- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003701 convenience function.
3702
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003703- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3704 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3705 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003706 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3707 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3708 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3709 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3710 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3711 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003712
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003713- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3714 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3715 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3716 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3717
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003718- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3719 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3720 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3721
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003722- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3723 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3724 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3725 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3726
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003727- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3728 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003730 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3731 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3732 new -l and -e options.
3733
3734- statcache is now deprecated.
3735
3736- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3737 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003738 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003739 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3740 time properly taken into account.
3741
3742- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3743 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3744 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3745 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3746
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003747Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003749
3750Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003752
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003753- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3754 is built with libdb3 if available.
3755
3756- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3757
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003758C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003760
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003761- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3762 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3763 PySequence_Size().
3764
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003765- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3766
3767- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3768 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3769 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3770
3771- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3772 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3773
3774- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3775 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3776
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003777New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003779
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003780- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3781 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3782
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003783- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3784 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3785
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003786- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3787
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003788Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003790
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003791- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3792 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3793
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003794Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003796
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003797Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003799
3800- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3801 removed completely in the next release.
3802
3803- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3804 OSX.
3805
3806- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3807 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3808
3809- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3810
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003811
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003812What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003813===========================
3814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3816
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003817Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003819
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003820- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003821 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003822 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003823 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3824 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003825 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3826 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003827 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3828 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003829
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003830- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3831 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3832
3833- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3834 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3835
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003836Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003838
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003839- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3840 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3841 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3842 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3843 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3844 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3845 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3846 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3847
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003848- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3849 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3850 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3851 example).
3852
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003853- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003854 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003855 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003856 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003857
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003858- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3859 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3860 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003861 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003862
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003863- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3864 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3865 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3866 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3867 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3868 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3869
3870 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3871
3872 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3873
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003874Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003876
3877- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3878
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003879- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3880
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003881- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3882 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003883
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003884- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3885 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3886 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3887 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3888 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3889 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003890 attributes.
3891
3892- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3893 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3894 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003895
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003896- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3897 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3898 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003899
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003900- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3901 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3902 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003903 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3904 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3905
3906- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3907 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003908
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003909Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003911
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003912- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3913 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3914
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003915- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3916 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3917 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3918 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3919
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003920- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3921 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3922 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3923 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3924
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003925 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3926 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3927 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3928 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3929 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3930 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3931 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3932 without losing information).
3933
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003934- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003935 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3936 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3937 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3938 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3939 module).
3940
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003941 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003942 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3943 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3944 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3945 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003946
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003947- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003948 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3949 encoding.
3950
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003951- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3952 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3953
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003955 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3956
3957- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3958 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3959 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3960 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3961
3962- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3963
3964- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3965 ON, and OFF.
3966
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003967- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3968 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3969
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003970Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003972
3973- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3974 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3975 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003976
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003977- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3978 been added: -X and -E.
3979
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003980Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003982
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003983- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3984 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3985
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003986C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003988
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003989- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3990 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3991 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3992 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3993 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3994
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003995- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3996 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3997 as long) arguments.
3998
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003999- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4000 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4001 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4002 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4003 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4004 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4005
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004006- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4007 input.
4008
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004009New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004011
4012Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004014
4015Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004016-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004017
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004018- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4019 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4020 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4021
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004022- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4023 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4024 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004025 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004026
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4028 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4029 import signal
4030 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004031
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004033 while 1:
4034 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004036 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4037 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4038 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4039 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004040
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004041
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004042What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4043===========================
4044
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4046
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004047Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004049
4050- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4051 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4052 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4053
4054- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4055 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4056 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4057 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4058 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4059 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4060 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004061
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004062- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004063 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004064 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4065 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4066 associate a docstring with a property.
4067
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004068- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4069 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4070 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4071 other built-in object types.
4072
4073- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4074 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4075 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4076 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4077 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4078
4079- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4080 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4081
4082- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4083 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004084 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004085 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4086 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4087 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4088 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4089 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4090
4091- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4092 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4093 class.
4094
4095- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4096 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4097 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4098 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4099
4100- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4101 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4102 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4103 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4104
4105- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4106 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4107
4108- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4109 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4110 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4111 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4112 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004113 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004114 with the same value as s.
4115
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004116- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4117
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004118Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004120
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004121- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4122
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004123- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4124 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4125 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4126 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4127 objects.
4128
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004129- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4130 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004131 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4132 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4133
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004134- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4135 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4136 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4137
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004138Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004140
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004141- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4142 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4143 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4144 by the instances.
4145
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004146- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4147 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4148 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4149
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004150- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4151 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4152 before the entire comparison is complete.
4153
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004154- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4155 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4156 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4157
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004158- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4159 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4160 getwriter().
4161
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004162- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4163 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4164
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004165- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004166 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4167 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4168
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004169- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4170 iterable object.
4171
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004172- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4173 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004174
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004175- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4176 authentication.
4177
4178- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4179 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004180
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004181- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004182 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4183 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4184 a sample driver.)
4185
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004186Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004188
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004189- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4190 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4191 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4192 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4193 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4194 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4195 kernel has large file support.
4196
4197- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4198 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4199 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4200 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4201 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4202
4203- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4204 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4205 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4206
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004207C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004209
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004210- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4211 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4212
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004213New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004215
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004216- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4217 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4218
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004219Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004221
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004222- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4223 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4224 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4225 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4226 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4227
4228- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4229 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4230 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4231 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4232
4233- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4234 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4235
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004236Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004238
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004239- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004240 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4241 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004242
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004243
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004244What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4245===========================
4246
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4248
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004249Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004251
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004252- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4253 big to represent as a C double.
4254
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004255- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4256 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4257 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4258 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4259 restriction).
4260
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004261- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4262 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4263 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4264 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4265 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4266
4267 >>> dir([])
4268 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4269 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4270 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4271 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4272 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4273 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4274 'reverse', 'sort']
4275
4276 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4277
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004278- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004279 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4280 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4281 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4282 OverflowError exception.
4283
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004284- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004285 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004286 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4287 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4288 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4289 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4290 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004291 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4293 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4294
4295 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4296 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4297 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4298 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004299
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004300- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004301 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4302 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4303 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4304 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4305 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4306 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4307 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4308 once it is created.
4309
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004310- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4311 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4312 (key, value) pairs.
4313
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004314- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004315 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4316 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4317
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004318- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4319 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4320 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4321 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4322 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004323
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004324- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004325 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4326 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4327
4328 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4329
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004330- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004331 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4332
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004333Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004335
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004336- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004337 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4338 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004339
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004340- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4341 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4342 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4343 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4344 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4345 in this area anymore).
4346
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004347- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4348 threading.Timer.
4349
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004350- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4351 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4352
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004353- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004354 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4355
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004356- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004357 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4358 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4359 converted to Python longs.
4360
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004361- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004362 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4363
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004364- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4365 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4366 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4367
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004368Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004370
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004371- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4372 division operators as per PEP 238.
4373
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004374Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004376
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004377- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4378 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4379 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4380 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4381
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004382C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004384
4385- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004386
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004387- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4388 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004389 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4392 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004393 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004394 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004395
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004396- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004397 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4398 module:
4399
4400 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004401
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004402 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4403 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004404
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004405 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4406 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004407
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004408 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4409
4410 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4411
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004412- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004413 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4414 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4415 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004416
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004417New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004419
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004420- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4421 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4422 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4423 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4424 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004425
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004426Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004428
4429Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004431
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004432- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4433 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4434 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4435 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004436 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4437 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4438 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4439 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4440 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004441
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004442- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004443 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4444
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004445
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004446What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4447===========================
4448
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4450
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004451Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004453
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004454- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4455 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4456
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004457- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4458 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4459 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004460
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004461- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4462 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4463 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4464 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004465
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004466- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4467
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004469
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004470Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004472
4473- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004474 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004475 the module docstring for details.
4476
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004477Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004479
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004480- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004481 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4482 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4483 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004484
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004485- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4486 Nick Mathewson.
4487
4488Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004490
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004491- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4492 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4493 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4494 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4495 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4496 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4497 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4498 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4499
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004500- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4501 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4502 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4503 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4504
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004505- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4506 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4507 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4508 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4509 come a long way).
4510
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004511- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4512 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4513 write filters for these warnings).
4514
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004515- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4516 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4517 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4518 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4519 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4520
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004521- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4522 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4523 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4524 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4525 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4526 older distribution.
4527
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004528Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004530
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004531- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4532 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004533 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004534
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004535- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4536 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4537 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4538
4539- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4540
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004541- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4542
4543- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4544
4545- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004548
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004549- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4550
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004551New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004553
4554C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004556
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004557- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4558 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4559 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4560 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4561 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4562 against buffer overruns.
4563
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004564- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004565 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4566 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004567 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4568 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4569 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4570
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004571- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4572 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4573 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4574 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4575 deprecated.
4576
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004577Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004578-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004579
4580- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4581 relevant is found.
4582
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004583
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004584What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004585===========================
4586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4588
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004589Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004591
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004592- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4593 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4594 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4595 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4596 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4597 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4598 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4599 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004600 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004601 repaired.
4602
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004603- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004604 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004605 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4606 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4607 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4608 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4609 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4610 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4611 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4612 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4613
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004614- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4615 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4616 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4617 leading BMO character).
4618
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004619- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4620 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4621 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4622
4623 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4624 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4625 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004626
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004627 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4628 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4629 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4630 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4631 for various simple to use conversions.
4632
4633 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4634 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4635
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4637 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4638 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4639 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4640 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4641 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4642 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4643 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4644 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4645 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4646 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4647 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4648 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4649 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4650 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004651
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004652- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4653 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4654 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004655 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004656 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004657
4658 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004659 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4660 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4661 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4662 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4663 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004664 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4665 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004666
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004667 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4668 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4669 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004670 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004671
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004672- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4673 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4674 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4675 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4676 floating arithmetic,
4677
4678 x = 9007199254740992.0
4679 print long(x)
4680
4681 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4682 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4683 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4684 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4685 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4686 functions are of good quality).
4687
4688 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4689 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4690 algorithms to break.
4691
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004692- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4693 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4694 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4695 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4696 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4697 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4698 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4699 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4700 order.
4701
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004702- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4703 operation along the most common code paths.
4704
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004705- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4706 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4707
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004708- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4709 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4710 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4711 {}.update(UserDict())
4712
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004713- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4714 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4715 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4716 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4717 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4718 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4719 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4720 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4721
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004722- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004723 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004725 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004726 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4727 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004728 join() method of strings
4729 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004730 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4731 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004732 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004733 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004734
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004735- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4736 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4737
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004738- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4739 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4740
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004741- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4742 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4743 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4744 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4745
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004746- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4747 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004748 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004749 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4750 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004751
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004752- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4753
4754
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004755Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004757
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004758- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004759 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004760 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4761 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4762
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004763- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4764 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4765
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004766- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4767 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4768 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4769 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4770
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004771- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4772 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4773 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4774
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004775- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4776
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004777- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4778
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004779- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4780 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4781 that are still imported into string.py).
4782
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004783- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4784
4785- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4786 Now it does.
4787
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004788- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4789
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004790- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4791 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4792 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4793 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4794 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004795 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4796 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004797
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004798- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4799 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4800 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4801 'help(object)'.
4802
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004803Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004805
4806- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004807 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004808 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4809 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4810
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004811- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004812 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4813 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004814
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004815C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004817
4818- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4819 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820
4821----
4822
4823**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**