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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
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
16
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
18 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
19 arguments.
20
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000021Extension modules
22-----------------
23
24- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
25
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000026- datetime changes:
27
28 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000029 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
30 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000031
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000032 In dt.asdatetime(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000033 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000034 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
35 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
36 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
37 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000038
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000039 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
40 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
41 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000042 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
43
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000044 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
45 by a later example coded by Guido.
46
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000047 datetimetz.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
48 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
49 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
50 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
51 ends. See new docs for details.
52
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +000053 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
54 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
55 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
56 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
57 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
58
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000059Library
60-------
61
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +000062- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
63 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
64 See SF bug #659228.
65
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +000066- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
67 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
68 See SF patch #651082.
69
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +000070- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000071
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000072Tools/Demos
73-----------
74
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000075TBD
76
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000077Build
78-----
79
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +000080- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
81 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
82 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
83 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
84 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
85 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
86 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
87 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
88 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
89
90- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
91 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
92 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
93 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
94
95- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
96 from the Tools/scripts directory.
97
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000098C API
99-----
100
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000101TBD
102
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000103New platforms
104-------------
105
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000106TBD
107
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000108Tests
109-----
110
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000111TBD
112
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000113Windows
114-------
115
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000116- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
117 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
118
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000119Mac
120---
121
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000122TBD
123
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000124
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000125What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000126=================================
127
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000128*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000129
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000130Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000131--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000132
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000133- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
134
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000135- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
136 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000137 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000138 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000139 a different meaning than before.
140
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000141- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000142 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000143 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000144
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000145- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000146 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000147 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000148
149- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
150 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
151 and deallocation.
152
153- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
154 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
155
156- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
157 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
158 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
159 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
160 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
161
162- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
163 now detected by the garbage collector.
164
165- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
166 [SF bug 519621]
167
168- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
169 identifier.
170
171- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
172 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
173 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
174 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
175 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
176 [SF bug 563060]
177
178- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
179 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
180 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
181 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
182 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
183
184- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
185 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
186 not called. [SF bug #537450]
187
188- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
189
190- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
191 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
192 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
193 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
194 state of the slots would be lost.)
195
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000196Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000197-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000198
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000199- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000200 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
201 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
202 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
203 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000204 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
205 Jython 2.1.
206
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000207- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000208 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000209 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
210 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
211 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
212 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
213 these, see PEP 302.
214
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000215- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
216 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
217 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
218
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000219- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
220 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
221 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
222
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000223- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
224 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
225 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
226
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000227- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
228 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
229 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
230 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
231 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
232 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
233 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
234 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
235 releases or implementations.
236
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000237- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000238 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
239 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000240
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000241- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
242 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
243
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000244- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
245 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
246 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
247
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000248- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
249 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
250
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000251- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
252 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000253 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
254 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000255
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000256- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
257 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
258 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
259 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
260 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
261
262 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
263 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
264 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
265 pattern.
266
267 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
268 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
269 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
270 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
271
272 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
273 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
274 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
275 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
276 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
277 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
278
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000279- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
280 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
281 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
282 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
283 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
284 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
285 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
286 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000287
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000288- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
289 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
290 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
291 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
292 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000293 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
294 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
295 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
296 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
297 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
298 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
299 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000300
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000301- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
302 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
303
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000304- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
305 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
306 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
307 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
308 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
309 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
310 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
311 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
312 to Zack Weinberg!
313
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000314- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
315 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
316 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
317 type. This has been fixed now.
318
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000319- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
320 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
321 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
322
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000323- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
324 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
325 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
326 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
327 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
328 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
329 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
330 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000331 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000332
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000333- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
334 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
335 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000336
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000337- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
338 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
339 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
340 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
341 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
342 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
343 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
344 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000345 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000346 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
347 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
348
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000349- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
350 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
351 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
352 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
353 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
354 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
355 this.)
356
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000357- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
358 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000359 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000360 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000361 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
362 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000363 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
364 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000365
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000366- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
367 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
368 currently running.
369
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000370- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
371 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
372 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
373 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
374
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000375- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
376 as directory names.
377
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000378- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
379 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
380
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000381- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
382 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
383
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000384- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000385 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
386 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000387
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000388- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
389 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
390 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
391 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
392 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
393
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000394- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
395 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
396 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
397 removed.
398
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000399- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
400 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
401 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
402
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000403- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
404 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
405 to __debug__.
406
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000407- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
408 string to the left with zeros. For example,
409 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
410
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000411- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
412 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
413 deprecated now.
414
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000415- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
416 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
417 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000418
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000419- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
420 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
421 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
422 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
423 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000424
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000425- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
426 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
427
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000428- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
429 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
430 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000431 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000432 is backward compatible.
433
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000434- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
435 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
436 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
437 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
438 could access a pointer to freed memory.
439
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000440- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
441 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
442 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
443 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
444 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
445 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000446
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000447- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
448 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
449
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000450- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
451 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
452
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000453- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
454 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
455 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
456 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
457 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
458
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000459- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
460 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
461 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
462
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000463- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000464 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
465
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000466- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
467 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
468 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000469
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000470- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
471 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
472
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000473- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
474 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
475 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
476
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000477Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000478-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000479
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000480- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
481
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000482- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
483 archives.
484
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000485- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
486 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
487 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
488
489 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
490
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000491- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
492 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
493 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000494 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000495
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000496- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
497 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
498 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
499 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
500 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000501
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000502- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
503 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000504
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000505- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
506
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000507- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
508 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
509
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000510- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
511 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
512 supported.
513
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000514- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
515
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000516- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
517 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000518
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000519- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
520 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
521
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000522- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
523
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000524- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
525 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
526
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000527- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
528 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
529 functions but callable type objects.
530
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000531- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000532 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000533 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000534
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000535- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
536 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000537
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000538- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
539 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000540
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000541- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
542 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
543 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
544 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
545
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000546- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
547 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000548
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000549- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
550 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
551 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
552 and __imul__.
553
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000554- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000555 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
556 is called.
557
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000558- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
559 been added where available.
560
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000561- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
562 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
563 interpreter was compiled.
564
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000565- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
566 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
567 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000568 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000569 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
570 1, not 2.
571
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000572- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
573 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
574 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
575 limit.
576
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000577- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
578 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
579 bug #623464.
580
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000581- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
582 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
583 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
584 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
585
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000586Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000587-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000588
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000589- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
590
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000591- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
592 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
593 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
594 with Python 2.3a2.
595
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000596- os.path exposes getctime.
597
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000598- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
599 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
600 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
601 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
602 unit tests of floating point results.
603
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000604- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
605 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
606 has been increased.
607
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000608- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
609 executed.
610
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000611- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
612 postinstallation script.
613
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000614- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
615 test the current module.
616
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000617- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
618 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
619 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
620 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
621 this behavior needs to be controlled.
622
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000623- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000624 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000625 Ward's Optik package.
626
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000627- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
628 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
629 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
630 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
631
632- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
633 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000634 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000635
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000636- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
637 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
638 shelf are binary pickles.
639
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000640- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
641 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
642
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000643- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
644 modules are iterators now.
645
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000646- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
647 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
648 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
649 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
650 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
651 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000652
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000653- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
654 with their entity value.
655
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000656- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
657
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000658- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
659 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000660
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000661- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
662 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000663 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000664
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000665- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
666 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
667 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
668 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
669 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
670 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
671 main():
672
673 import locale
674 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
675
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000676- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
677 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
678
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000679- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
680 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
681 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
682 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
683 to the new standard.
684
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000685- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
686 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
687 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
688 an extension to the database.
689
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000690- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
691 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
692 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
693 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000694 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000695
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000696- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
697
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000698- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000699 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000700
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000701- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
702 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
703 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
704 bounded integers.
705
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000706- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
707 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
708 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
709 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
710 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
711 in existence.
712
713 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
714 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
715 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
716 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
717 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
718 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
719
720 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
721 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
722 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
723 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
724
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000725- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
726 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
727 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
728
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000729- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
730
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000731- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
732 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
733 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
734 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
735
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000736- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
737 argument.
738
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000739- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
740 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
741 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
742 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
743 [SF patch 560794].
744
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000745- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
746 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
747 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000748 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
749 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
750 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000751
752- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
753 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000754
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000755- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
756 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
757 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
758 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000759
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000760- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
761 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
762 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
763 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
764 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
765
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000766- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000767
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000768- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
769
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000770- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
771 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
772 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
773 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
774 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
775 identical to None.
776
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000777- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
778 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
779 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
780 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
781 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
782 results now.
783
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000784- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
785 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
786
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000787- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
788 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
789 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
790 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
791 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
792 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
793 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
794 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
795
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000796- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
797
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000798- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
799 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
800
801- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
802 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
803 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
804 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
805 and other systems.
806
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000807- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
808 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
809 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
810 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 +0000811 work well with these.
812
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000813- compileall now supports quiet operation.
814
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000815- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000816 connections.
817
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000818- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
819 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
820 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
821
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000822- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
823 sets
824
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000825- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
826 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
827 name.
828
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000829- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
830 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
831 passed in.
832
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000833- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000834 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000835 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
836 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000837
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000838- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
839
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000840- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
841
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000842- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
843 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
844 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
845
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000846- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
847 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
848 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
849 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000850 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000851
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000852- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000853 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000854 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000855
856- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
857 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
858 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
859
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000860- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000861 the value of its expression argument.
862
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000863- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
864 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
865 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
866
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000867- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
868 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
869 skipstone browser was included.
870
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000871- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
872 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
873
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000874Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000875-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000876
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000877- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
878 names in addition to accepting file names.
879
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000880- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
881 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
882 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
883 still used and useful.)
884
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000885- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
886 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
887 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
888 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000889
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000890- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
891 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
892 the generated binary.
893
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000894Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000895-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000896
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000897- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
898
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000899- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
900 except in the hands of experts.
901
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000902- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000903 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
904 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
905 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000906
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000907- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
908 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
909 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
910 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
911 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
912 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
913 builds.
914
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000915- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
916 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
917 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
918 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
919 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
920 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
921 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
922 new type.
923
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000924- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000925
926 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
927 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
928 positive infinities.
929
930 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
931 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
932 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
933 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
934 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
935 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
936 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
937
938 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
939
940 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
941
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000942- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
943 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
944 size of the executable.
945
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000946- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
947 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
948 configure script. On other platforms, remove
949 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000950
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000951- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
952
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000953- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
954 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
955 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000956
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000957- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
958 well as Unix.
959
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000960- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
961 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
962 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
963 modules in the README file for details.
964
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000965C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000966-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000967
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000968- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
969 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000970 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000971 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000972 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000973
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000974- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
975 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
976 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
977 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
978 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
979 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
980 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
981 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
982 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
983 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
984 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
985 aligned.)
986
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000987- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
988 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
989 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
990
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000991- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
992 level.
993
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000994- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
995 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
996 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
997 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
998 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
999
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001000- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1001 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1002 code.
1003
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001004- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1005 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1006 adjusting for negative indices.
1007
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001008- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1009 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1010 object.
1011
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001012- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1013 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1014 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1015
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001016- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1017 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001018
1019- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1020
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001021- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1022 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1023 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1024 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1025
1026- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1027
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001028- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001029
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001030- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001031 without going through the buffer API.
1032
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001033- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001034
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001035- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1036 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1037 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1038 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1039
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001040- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1041 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1042
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001043- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001044 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1045
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001046New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001047-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001048
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001049- OpenVMS is now supported.
1050
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001051- AtheOS is now supported.
1052
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001053- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1054
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001055- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1056
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001057Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001058-----
1059
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001060- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1061 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1062 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001063
1064Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001065-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001066
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001067- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1068 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1069 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1070 bugs.
1071 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001072 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1073 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1074 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001075 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001076
1077- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001078 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001079
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001080- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1081 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1082
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001083- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1084 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1085 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1086 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1087
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001088- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1089 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1090 use files" uninstall option).
1091
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001092- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1093
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001094- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1095 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1096
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001097- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1098 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1099 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1100
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001101- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1102 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1103 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1104 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1105 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001106 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1107 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1108 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001109
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001110- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001111 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001112 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1113 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1114 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1115 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1116 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1117 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1118 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1119 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1120 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1121 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1122 work around.
1123
1124- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1125 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1126 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1127 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1128 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1129 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1130 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1131 specified with O_CREAT too).
1132
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001133Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001134----
1135
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001136- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001137
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001138- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1139 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1140 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1141
1142- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1143 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1144 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1145 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1146 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1147 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1148 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1149 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001150
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001151- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1152 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1153 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001154
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001155- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1156 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1157 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1158 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1159 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001160
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001161- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1162 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1163 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001164
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001165- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1166 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001167
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001168- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1169 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1170 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1171 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1172 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001173
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001174- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1175 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1176 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1177
1178- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1179 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1180 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001181
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001182- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1183 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1184 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1185 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1186 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001187
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001188- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1189 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001190
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001191- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1192 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001193
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001194What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001195===============================
1196
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001197*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1198
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001199Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001200--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001201
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001202- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1203 with a custom metaclass.
1204
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001205Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001206-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001207
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001208- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1209 are proxies.
1210
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001211Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001212-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001213
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001214- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1215 very short strings.
1216
1217- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1218 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1219 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1220 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1221 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1222
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001223Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001224-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001225
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001226- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1227 close or delete time).
1228
1229- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1230 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1231
1232- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1233
1234- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001235 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001236
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001237Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001238-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001239
1240Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001241-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001242
1243C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001244-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001245
1246New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001247-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001248
1249Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001250-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001251
1252Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001253-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001254
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001255- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1256
1257- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1258 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1259
1260- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1261 deleted at process exit time.
1262
1263- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1264 in backslash.
1265
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001266Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001267----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001268
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001269- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1270 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1271 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1272
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001273
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001274What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001275===========================
1276
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001277*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1278
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001279Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001280--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001281
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001282- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1283 been extensively updated. See
1284
1285 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1286
1287 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1288
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001289- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1290 deleted!
1291
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001292- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1293 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1294 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1295 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1296 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1297
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001298- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1299
1300 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1301 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1302
1303 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1304 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1305 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1306 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1307 supported anyway.
1308
1309 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1310 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1311
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001312- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1313 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1314 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1315 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1316 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001317
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001318- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1319 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1320 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1321
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001322Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001323-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001324
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001325- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1326 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1327 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1328 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1329 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1330 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001331 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1332 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1333 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1334 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001335
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001336- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1337 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1338 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1339
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001340Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001341-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001342
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001343- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1344
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001345Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001346-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001347
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001348- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1349 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1350 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1351 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1352 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1353 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1354
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001355- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1356
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001357- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1358
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001359- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1360
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001361- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1362 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1363 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1364
1365- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1366
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001367Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001368-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001369
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001370- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1371 off a search on Google.
1372
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001373Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001374-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001375
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001376- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1377 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1378 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1379 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1380 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1381 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1382 other platforms should do likewise.
1383
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001384- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1385 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1386 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1387
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001388C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001389-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001390
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001391- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1392 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1393 producing key-value pairs.
1394
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001395- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001396 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001397 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1398 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1399 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1400 previously went unchallenged.
1401
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001402New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001403-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001404
1405Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001406-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001407
1408Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001409-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001410
1411Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001412----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001413
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001414- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1415 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001416
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001417- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1418 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1419 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1420 home.
1421
1422
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001423What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001424===========================
1425
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001426*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1427
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001428Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001429--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001430
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001431- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1432 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001433
1434 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001435 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001436
1437 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1438 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001439 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001440 This needs to be documented.
1441
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001442- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1443 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1444
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001445- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1446 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1447 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1448
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001449- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1450 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1451
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001452- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1453 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1454 class forbids it).
1455
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001456- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1457 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1458 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1459
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001460- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1461
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001462Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001463-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001464
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001465- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1466 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001467 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001468
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001469- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1470 (like 1 + '').
1471
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001472Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001473-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001474
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001475- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1476 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1477 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1478 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001479 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001480 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1481
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001482- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1483 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1484 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1485 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1486
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001487- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1488 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001489 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1490 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1491 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001492
1493- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1494 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001495
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001496- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1497 bytes on its input.
1498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001499Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001500-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001501
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001502- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001503 convenience function.
1504
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001505- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1506 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1507 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001508 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1509 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1510 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1511 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1512 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1513 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001514
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001515- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1516 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1517 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1518 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1519
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001520- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1521 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1522 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1523
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001524- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1525 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1526 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1527 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1528
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001529- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1530 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001531 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001532 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1533 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1534 new -l and -e options.
1535
1536- statcache is now deprecated.
1537
1538- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1539 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001540 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001541 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1542 time properly taken into account.
1543
1544- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1545 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1546 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1547 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1548
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001549Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001550-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001551
1552Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001553-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001554
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001555- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1556 is built with libdb3 if available.
1557
1558- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1559
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001560C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001561-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001562
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001563- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1564 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1565 PySequence_Size().
1566
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001567- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1568
1569- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1570 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1571 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1572
1573- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1574 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1575
1576- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1577 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1578
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001579New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001580-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001581
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001582- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1583 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1584
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001585- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1586 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1587
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001588- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1589
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001590Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001591-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001592
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001593- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1594 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1595
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001596Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001597-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001598
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001599Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001600----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001601
1602- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1603 removed completely in the next release.
1604
1605- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1606 OSX.
1607
1608- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1609 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1610
1611- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1612
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001613
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001614What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001615===========================
1616
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001617*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1618
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001619Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001620--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001621
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001622- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001623 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001624 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001625 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1626 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001627 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1628 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001629 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1630 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001631
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001632- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1633 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1634
1635- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1636 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1637
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001638Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001639-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001640
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001641- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1642 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1643 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1644 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1645 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1646 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1647 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1648 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1649
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001650- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1651 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1652 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1653 example).
1654
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001655- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001656 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001657 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001658 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001659
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001660- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1661 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1662 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001663 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001664
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001665- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1666 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1667 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1668 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1669 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1670 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1671
1672 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1673
1674 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1675
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001676Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001677-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001678
1679- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1680
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001681- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1682
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001683- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1684 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001685
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001686- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1687 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1688 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1689 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1690 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1691 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001692 attributes.
1693
1694- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1695 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1696 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001697
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001698- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1699 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1700 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001701
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001702- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1703 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1704 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001705 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1706 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1707
1708- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1709 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001710
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001711Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001712-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001713
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001714- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1715 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1716
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001717- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1718 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1719 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1720 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1721
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001722- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1723 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1724 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1725 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1726
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001727 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1728 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1729 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1730 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1731 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1732 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1733 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1734 without losing information).
1735
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001736- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001737 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1738 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1739 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1740 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1741 module).
1742
1743 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1744 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1745 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1746 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1747 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001748
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001749- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001750 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1751 encoding.
1752
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001753- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1754 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1755
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001756- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001757 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1758
1759- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1760 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1761 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1762 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1763
1764- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1765
1766- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1767 ON, and OFF.
1768
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001769- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1770 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1771
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001772Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001773-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001774
1775- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1776 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1777 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001778
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001779- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1780 been added: -X and -E.
1781
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001782Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001783-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001784
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001785- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1786 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1787
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001788C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001789-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001790
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001791- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1792 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1793 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1794 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1795 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1796
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001797- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1798 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1799 as long) arguments.
1800
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001801- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1802 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1803 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1804 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1805 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1806 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1807
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001808- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1809 input.
1810
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001811New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001812-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001813
1814Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001815-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001816
1817Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001818-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001819
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001820- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1821 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1822 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1823
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001824- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1825 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1826 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001827 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001828
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001829 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1830 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1831 import signal
1832 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001833
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001834 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001835 while 1:
1836 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001838 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1839 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1840 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1841 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001842
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001843
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001844What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1845===========================
1846
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001847*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1848
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001849Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001850--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001851
1852- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1853 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1854 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1855
1856- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1857 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1858 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1859 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1860 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1861 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1862 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001863
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001864- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001865 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001866 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1867 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1868 associate a docstring with a property.
1869
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001870- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1871 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1872 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1873 other built-in object types.
1874
1875- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1876 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1877 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1878 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1879 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1880
1881- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1882 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1883
1884- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1885 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001886 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001887 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1888 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1889 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1890 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1891 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1892
1893- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1894 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1895 class.
1896
1897- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1898 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1899 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1900 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1901
1902- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1903 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1904 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1905 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1906
1907- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1908 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1909
1910- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1911 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1912 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1913 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1914 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001915 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001916 with the same value as s.
1917
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001918- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1919
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001920Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001921----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001922
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001923- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1924
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001925- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1926 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1927 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1928 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1929 objects.
1930
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001931- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1932 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001933 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1934 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1935
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001936- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1937 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1938 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1939
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001940Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001941-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001942
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001943- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1944 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1945 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1946 by the instances.
1947
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001948- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1949 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1950 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1951
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001952- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1953 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1954 before the entire comparison is complete.
1955
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001956- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1957 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1958 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1959
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001960- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1961 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1962 getwriter().
1963
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001964- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1965 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1966
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001967- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001968 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1969 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1970
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001971- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1972 iterable object.
1973
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001974- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1975 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001976
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001977- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1978 authentication.
1979
1980- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1981 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001982
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001983- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001984 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1985 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1986 a sample driver.)
1987
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001988Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001989-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001990
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001991- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1992 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1993 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1994 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1995 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1996 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1997 kernel has large file support.
1998
1999- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2000 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2001 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2002 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2003 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2004
2005- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2006 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2007 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2008
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002009C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002010-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002011
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002012- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2013 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2014
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002015New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002017
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002018- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2019 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2020
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002021Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002022-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002023
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002024- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2025 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2026 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2027 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2028 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2029
2030- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2031 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2032 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2033 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2034
2035- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2036 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2037
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002038Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002039-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002040
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002041- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002042 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2043 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002044
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002045
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002046What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2047===========================
2048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2050
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002051Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002053
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002054- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2055 big to represent as a C double.
2056
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002057- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2058 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2059 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2060 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2061 restriction).
2062
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002063- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2064 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2065 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2066 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2067 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2068
2069 >>> dir([])
2070 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2071 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2072 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2073 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2074 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2075 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2076 'reverse', 'sort']
2077
2078 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2079
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002080- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002081 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2082 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2083 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2084 OverflowError exception.
2085
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002086- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002087 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002088 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2089 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2090 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2091 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2092 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002093 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002094 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2095 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2096
2097 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2098 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2099 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2100 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002101
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002102- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002103 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2104 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2105 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2106 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2107 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2108 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2109 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2110 once it is created.
2111
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002112- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2113 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2114 (key, value) pairs.
2115
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002116- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002117 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2118 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2119
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002120- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2121 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2122 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2123 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2124 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002125
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002126- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002127 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2128 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2129
2130 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2131
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002132- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002133 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2134
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002135Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002136-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002137
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002138- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002139 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2140 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002141
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002142- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2143 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2144 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2145 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2146 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2147 in this area anymore).
2148
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002149- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2150 threading.Timer.
2151
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002152- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2153 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2154
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002155- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002156 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2157
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002158- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002159 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2160 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2161 converted to Python longs.
2162
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002163- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002164 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2165
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002166- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2167 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2168 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2169
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002170Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002171-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002172
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002173- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2174 division operators as per PEP 238.
2175
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002176Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002177-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002178
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002179- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2180 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2181 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2182 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2183
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002184C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002185-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002186
2187- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002188
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002189- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2190 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002191 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002192
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002193 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2194 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002195 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002197
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002198- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002199 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2200 module:
2201
2202 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002203
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002204 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2205 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002206
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002207 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2208 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002209
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002210 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2211
2212 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2213
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002214- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002215 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2216 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2217 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002218
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002219New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002220-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002221
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002222- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2223 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2224 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2225 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2226 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002227
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002228Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002229-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002230
2231Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002232-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002233
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002234- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2235 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2236 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2237 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002238 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2239 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2240 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2241 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2242 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002243
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002244- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002245 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2246
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002247
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002248What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2249===========================
2250
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002251*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2252
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002253Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002254-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002255
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002256- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2257 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2258
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002259- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2260 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2261 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002262
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002263- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2264 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2265 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2266 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002267
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002268- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2269
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002270- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002271
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002272Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002273-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002274
2275- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002276 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002277 the module docstring for details.
2278
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002279Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002280-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002281
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002282- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002283 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2284 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2285 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002286
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002287- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2288 Nick Mathewson.
2289
2290Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002291----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002292
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002293- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2294 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2295 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2296 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2297 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2298 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2299 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2300 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2301
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002302- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2303 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2304 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2305 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2306
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002307- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2308 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2309 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2310 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2311 come a long way).
2312
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002313- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2314 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2315 write filters for these warnings).
2316
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002317- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2318 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2319 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2320 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2321 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2322
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002323- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2324 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2325 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2326 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2327 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2328 older distribution.
2329
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002330Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002332
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002333- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2334 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002335 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002336
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002337- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2338 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2339 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2340
2341- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2342
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002343- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2344
2345- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2346
2347- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2348
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002349- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002350
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002351- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2352
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002353New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002354-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002355
2356C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002357-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002358
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002359- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2360 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2361 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2362 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2363 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2364 against buffer overruns.
2365
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002366- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002367 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2368 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002369 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2370 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2371 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2372
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002373- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2374 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2375 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2376 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2377 deprecated.
2378
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002379Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002380-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002381
2382- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2383 relevant is found.
2384
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002385
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002386What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002387===========================
2388
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002389*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2390
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002391Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002392----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002393
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002394- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2395 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2396 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2397 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2398 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2399 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2400 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2401 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002402 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002403 repaired.
2404
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002405- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002406 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002407 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2408 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2409 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2410 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2411 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2412 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2413 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2414 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2415
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002416- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2417 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2418 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2419 leading BMO character).
2420
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002421- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2422 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2423 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2424
2425 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2426 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2427 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002428
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002429 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2430 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2431 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2432 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2433 for various simple to use conversions.
2434
2435 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2436 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2437
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002438 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2439 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2440 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2441 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2442 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2443 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2444 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2445 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2446 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2447 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2448 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2449 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2450 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2451 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2452 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002453
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002454- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2455 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2456 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002457 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002458 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002459
2460 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002461 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2462 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2463 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2464 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2465 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002466 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2467 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002468
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002469 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2470 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2471 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002472 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002473
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002474- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2475 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2476 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2477 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2478 floating arithmetic,
2479
2480 x = 9007199254740992.0
2481 print long(x)
2482
2483 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2484 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2485 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2486 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2487 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2488 functions are of good quality).
2489
2490 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2491 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2492 algorithms to break.
2493
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002494- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2495 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2496 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2497 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2498 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2499 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2500 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2501 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2502 order.
2503
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002504- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2505 operation along the most common code paths.
2506
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002507- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2508 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2509
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002510- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2511 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2512 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2513 {}.update(UserDict())
2514
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002515- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2516 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2517 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2518 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2519 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2520 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2521 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2522 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2523
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002524- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002525 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002526
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002527 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002528 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2529 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002530 join() method of strings
2531 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002532 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2533 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002534 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002535 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002536
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002537- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2538 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2539
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002540- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2541 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2542
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002543- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2544 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2545 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2546 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2547
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002548- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2549 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002550 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002551 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2552 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002553
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002554- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2555
2556
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002557Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002559
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002560- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002561 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002562 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2563 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2564
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002565- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2566 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2567
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002568- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2569 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2570 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2571 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2572
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002573- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2574 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2575 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2576
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002577- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2578
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002579- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2580
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002581- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2582 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2583 that are still imported into string.py).
2584
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002585- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2586
2587- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2588 Now it does.
2589
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002590- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2591
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002592- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2593 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2594 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2595 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2596 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002597 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2598 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002599
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002600- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2601 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2602 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2603 'help(object)'.
2604
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002605Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002607
2608- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002609 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002610 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2611 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2612
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002613- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002614 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2615 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002616
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002617C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002619
2620- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2621 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002622
2623----
2624
2625**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**