blob: c9b7baa1c69cf4de4a1ae9d6197256bec28e2580 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000015- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
16 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
17 character other than a space.
18
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000019- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
20 by the function object or by the method object, the function
21 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
22 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
23 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
24 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
25 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
26 attributes with the same name.
27
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000028- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
29 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
30 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
31 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
32 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
33 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
34 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
35 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
36 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
37 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
38 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
39 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
40 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
41 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000042
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000043- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
44 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
45 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
46 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
47 This has been repaired.
48
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000049- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
50
51- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
52
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000053- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
54 over a sequence.
55
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000056- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
57
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000058- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
59 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
60 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
61 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
62 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
63 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
64 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
65 records with equal keys is unchanged).
66
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000067- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
68 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000069
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000070- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
71 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
72 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
73
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000074- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
75 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
76 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
77 freelist.
78
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000079- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
80 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
81
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000082- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
83 number.
84
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000085- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
86 a TypeError exception.
87
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000088- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
89 820195.
90
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000091- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
92 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
93 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
94
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000095Extension modules
96-----------------
97
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +000098- os.getsid was added.
99
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000100- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
101 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
102 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
103
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000104- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
105
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000106- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
107
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000108- readline.clear_history was added.
109
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000110- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
111
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000112- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
113
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000114- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
115
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000116- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
117
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000118- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
119
120- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
121
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000122- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
123
124- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
125
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000126- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
127 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
128 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
129
130- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
131 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
132 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
133 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
134 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
135 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
136 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
137
138- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
139 iterators from a single iterable.
140
141- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
142 of raising a TypeError exception.
143
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000144Library
145-------
146
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000147- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
148
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000149- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
150
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000151- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
152
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000153- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
154 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
155
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000156- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
157
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000158- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
159 a string).
160
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000161- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
162
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000163- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
164
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000165- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
166
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000167- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
168
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000169- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
170 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
171 list of fieldnames.
172
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000173- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
174 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
175
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000176- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
177
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000178- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
179 empty lists.
180
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000181- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
182 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
183 and shelves.
184
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000185- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
186 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
187
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000188- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000189 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
190 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000191
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000192- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
193 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000194 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000195
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000196- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000197 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
198 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
199
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000200- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
201 and removed in Py2.4.
202
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000203- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
204
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000205Tools/Demos
206-----------
207
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000208- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
209
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000210- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
211 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
212 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
213 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
214
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000215- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
216
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000217- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
218 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
219 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
220 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
221 now.
222
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000223- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
224 in effect
225
226- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
227 C-c C-h
228
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000229- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
230 -d option was given.
231
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000232Build
233-----
234
235C API
236-----
237
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000238- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
239 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
240 about 10% faster.
241
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000242- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
243 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
244
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000245- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
246 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
247 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
248 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
249
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000250New platforms
251-------------
252
253Tests
254-----
255
256Windows
257-------
258
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000259- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
260 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
261 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
262
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000263Mac
264----
265
266
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000267What's New in Python 2.3 final?
268===============================
269
270*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
271
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000272IDLE
273----
274
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000275- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
276 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
277 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
278 context-menu actions.
279
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000280- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
281 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
282 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
283 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
284 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
285 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
286 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
287 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
288 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
289
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000290
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000291What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
292=============================================
293
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000294*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000295
296Core and builtins
297-----------------
298
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000299- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000300 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000301 comment at the end are still unsupported.
302
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000303Extension modules
304-----------------
305
306- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
307 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
308 than once. This has been fixed.
309
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000310- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
311 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
312 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
313 call.
314
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000315- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
316
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000317Library
318-------
319
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000320- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
321 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
322
323- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
324 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
325 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
326 restored.
327
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000328IDLE
329----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000330
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000331- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000332
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000333Build
334-----
335
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000336- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
337 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
338
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000339C API
340-----
341
342Windows
343-------
344
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000345- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
346 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
347
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000348- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
349
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000350Mac
351---
352
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000353- Various fixes to pimp.
354
355- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
356
357- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
358 more problems than it solves.
359
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000360
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000361What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
362=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000363
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000364*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
365
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000366Core and builtins
367-----------------
368
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000369- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
370 by sys.setcheckinterval().
371
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000372- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
373 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000374 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000375
376- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
377 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
378 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000379 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000380
381- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
382 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000383
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000384- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
385 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
386 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
387
388- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000389 770247.
390
391- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000392
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000393Extension modules
394-----------------
395
396- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
397 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
398
399- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
400
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000401- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
402
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000403- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
404 contained within the _strptime module.
405
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000406- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
407 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
408
409- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000410 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
411
412- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
413 the find_class attribute, if present.
414
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000415- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000416
417 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
418 (SF bug 763298).
419
420 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000421 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
422 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
423 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000424
425 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
426
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000427Library
428-------
429
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000430- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
431
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000432- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
433 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
434 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
435 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
436 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
437 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
438 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
439 or Tester().
440
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000441- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
442 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
443 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
444 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
445 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
446 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
447 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
448 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
449 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000450
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000451 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000452
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000453- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
454 weren't before was an oversight.
455
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000456- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
457 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
458
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000459- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
460 when there are no lines.
461
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000462- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
463 which could occur with Tk 8.4
464
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000465- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
466 to child processes.
467
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000468- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
469
470- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
471
472- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
473 xmlrpclib.
474
475- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
476 responses.
477
478- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
479 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
480
481- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
482 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
483 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
484
485- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
486 used as patterns.
487
488- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
489 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
490 than Tk 8.3.
491
492- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
493
494- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000495
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000496Tools/Demos
497-----------
498
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000499- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
500
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000501- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
502
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000503- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000504
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000505Build
506-----
507
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000508- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
509
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000510- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
511
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000512- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
513 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000514
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000515- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
516 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
517 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000518
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000519C API
520-----
521
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000522- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
523 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
524
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000525Windows
526-------
527
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000528- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
529 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
530 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
531 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
532 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
533 Python exception ::
534
535 thread.error: can't start new thread
536
537 is raised now.
538
539- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
540 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
541 instead of from DLL teardown.
542
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000543Mac
544---
545
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000546- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000547 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000548 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
549 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
550 the executable in the bundle.
551
552- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000553
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000554- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
555
556- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
557 on Panther.
558
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000559What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
560================================
561
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000562*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000563
564Core and builtins
565-----------------
566
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000567- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
568 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
569 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
570 with the -i option.
571
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000572- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
573 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
574
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000575- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
576 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
577
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000578- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
579 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
580 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
581 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
582 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
583 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
584 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
585 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
586 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
587 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
588 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
589 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
590 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000591
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000592- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
593 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
594 embedded in a lambda expression.
595
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000596- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
597 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
598 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
599 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
600 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
601
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000602- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
603 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
604 matches the restriction on classic classes.
605
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000606- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
607 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
608
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000609- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
610 It's writable again.
611
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000612- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
613 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
614 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000615 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000616
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000617- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
618 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
619 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
620
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000621Extension modules
622-----------------
623
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000624- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
625 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
626
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000627- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
628 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
629 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
630 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
631
632- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
633 collection.
634
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000635- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
636 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
637 unique within a single program run.
638
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000639- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
640 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
641
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000642- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
643 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
644
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000645- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
646 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000647
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000648- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
649
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000650- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
651 Fixes SF bug #730685.
652
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000653- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
654 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
655 for many BSD-derived systems.
656
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000657
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000658Library
659-------
660
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000661- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
662 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
663 primary ones:
664
665 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
666 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
667 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
668
669 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
670 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
671 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
672 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
673 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
674 framework features (which doctest lacks).
675
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000676- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
677 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
678 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
679 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
680 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
681 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
682 argument.
683
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000684- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
685 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
686 in the archive.
687
688- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
689 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
690
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000691- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
692 569574).
693
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000694- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
695 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
696 no more.
697
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000698- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
699 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
700 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
701 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
702 code coverage.
703
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000704- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
705 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
706 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000707 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
708 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000709
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000710- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
711 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
712 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000713 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000714
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000715- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
716
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000717- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
718 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
719 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
720 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
721
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000722- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
723 handling.
724
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000725- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
726 __doc__ of data descriptors.
727
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000728- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
729 in socket.py.
730
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000731- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
732
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000733- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
734 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
735 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
736 opener with proxy support.
737
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000738- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
739
740- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
741
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000742Tools/Demos
743-----------
744
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000745- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
746
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000747- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
748
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000749- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
750 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000751
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000752- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
753 files.
754
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000755Build
756-----
757
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000758- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000759 different root directory.
760
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000761C API
762-----
763
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000764- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
765 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
766 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
767 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
768 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
769 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
770 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
771 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
772 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
773 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
774
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000775- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
776 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
777 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
778 from Python.
779
780
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000781New platforms
782-------------
783
784None this time.
785
786Tests
787-----
788
789- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
790 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
791
792Windows
793-------
794
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000795- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
796
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000797- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
798 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
799 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
800 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
801 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
802 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
803 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
804 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
805 that's what it's for.
806
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000807Mac
808---
809
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000810- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
811 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
812 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
813 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000814- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
815 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
816- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000817
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000818SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
819------------------------------------
820
821430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
822598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
823622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
824661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
825683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
826697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
827713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
828724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
829727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
830729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
831730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
832731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
833732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
834733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
835735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
836740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
837744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
838745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
839747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
840749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
841751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
842753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
843755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
844757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
845760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
846
847
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000848What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
849================================
850
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000851*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000852
853Core and builtins
854-----------------
855
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000856- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
857 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
858
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000859- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
860 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
861 and cannot be strings).
862
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000863- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
864 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
865 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
866 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
867
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000868- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
869 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
870 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
871 Python itself.
872
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000873- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
874 the referenced object, if it has one.
875
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000876- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
877 the thread started at
878 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
879
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000880- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
881 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
882 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
883 placed on a list index.
884
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000885- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
886 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
887 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
888 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
889
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000890- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
891 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
892 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
893 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
894 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
895 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
896 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
897
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000898- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
899 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
900 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
901 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
902 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
903
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000904- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
905 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000906
907- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
908 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
909 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
910 #693195.)
911
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000912- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
913 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000914
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000915- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000916 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000917 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
918 interpreter executions, would fail.
919
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000920- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000921 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000922 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000923
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000924Extension modules
925-----------------
926
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000927- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
928 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
929 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
930 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
931
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000932- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
933 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
934
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000935- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
936 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
937 and Greg Chapman.)
938
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000939- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
940 recursively.
941
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000942- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000943 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
944 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
945 leaks.
946
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000947- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
948
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000949- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
950 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
951 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
952 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
953 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
954 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
955 #705836.
956
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000957- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000958 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
959
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000960- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
961 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
962 See SF bug #692416.
963
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000964- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
965 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
966
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000967- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
968 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
969 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000970
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000971- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000972 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
973 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
974
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000975- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
976 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
977 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
978 timeouts to work properly.
979
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000980Library
981-------
982
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000983- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
984 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
985 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
986 future release.
987
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000988- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
989 for querying platform dependent features.
990
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000991- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000992
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000993- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
994 pickle protocol versions.
995
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000996- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
997 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
998 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
999
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001000- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1001
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001002- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1003 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1004 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1005 modules.
1006
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001007- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1008 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1009 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1010
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001011- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1012 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1013
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001014- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1015 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1016 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1017
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001018- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001019 MS Office extensions.
1020
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001021- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1022 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1023
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001024- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1025 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1026
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001027- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1028 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1029 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1030 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1031 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1032 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1033
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001034- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1035 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1036 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001037
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001038- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1039 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1040 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1041
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001042- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1043
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001044- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1045 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1046 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1047
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001048Tools/Demos
1049-----------
1050
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001051- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1052 See the module docstring for details.
1053
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001054Build
1055-----
1056
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001057- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1058 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001059
1060C API
1061-----
1062
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001063- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1064
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001065- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1066 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1067 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1068
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001069- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1070 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001071
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001072 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1073 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1074 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001075
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001076- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001077 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1078
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001079- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1080 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1081 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001082
1083New platforms
1084-------------
1085
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001086None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001087
1088Tests
1089-----
1090
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001091- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1092 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001093
1094Windows
1095-------
1096
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001097- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1098 function.
1099
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001100- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1101 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001102
1103Mac
1104---
1105
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001106- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1107 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001108
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001109- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1110 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001111
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001112- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1113 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1114 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001115
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001116- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001117 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1118 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001119
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001120- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1121 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001122
1123
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001124What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1125=================================
1126
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001127*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001128
1129Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001130-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001131
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001132- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1133 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1134 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1135
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001136- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1137 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1138 (SF patch #664376.)
1139
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001140- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1141 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1142 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1143 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1144 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1145 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001146 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001147
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001148- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1149 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1150 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1151 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001152 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001153
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001154- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1155 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1156 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1157 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1158 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1159 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1160 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1161 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1162 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1163 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1164 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1165
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001166- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1167 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1168 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1169 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1170 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1171 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1172
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001173- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1174 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1175
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001176- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1177 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1178 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1179 case.)
1180
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001181- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1182 passed as unicode strings.
1183
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001184- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1185 See SF bug #683467.
1186
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001187- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1188 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1189
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001190- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1191
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001192- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1193
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001194- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1195 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1196 arguments.
1197
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001198- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1199 See SF bug #667147.
1200
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001201- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001202 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001203 See SF bug #676155.
1204
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001205- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001206 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001207 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1208 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1209 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1210 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1211 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1212 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001213
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001214Extension modules
1215-----------------
1216
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001217- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1218 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1219 tp_as_number pointer.
1220
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001221- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1222 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1223 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1224 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1225 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1226
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001227- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1228
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001229- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1230
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001231- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001232 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001233 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1234 patch #678531.)
1235
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001236- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1237 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1238
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001239- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1240 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1241
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001242- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1243
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001244- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1245 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1246 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1247
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001248- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1249
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001250- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1251 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1252
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001253- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001254
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001255- datetime changes:
1256
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001257 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1258
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001259 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1260 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1261 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1262 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1263 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1264 now.
1265
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001266 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001267 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1268 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001269
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001270 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001271 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001272 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1273 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1274 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1275 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001276
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001277 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1278 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1279 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001280 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1281
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001282 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1283 by a later example coded by Guido.
1284
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001285 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001286 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1287 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1288 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001289 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1290 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1291
1292 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1293 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1294 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1295 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1296 tzinfo subclass instance.
1297
1298 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1299 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1300 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1301 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1302 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1303 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1304 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1305 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001306
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001307 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1308 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1309 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1310 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1311 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001312 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1313
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001314 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001315
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001316 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1317 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1318 as a naive datetime object.
1319
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001320 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1321 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1322 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1323
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001324 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1325 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1326 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1327 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1328 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1329 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1330 comparison.
1331
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001332 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1333 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1334 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1335 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001336 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001337
1338 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001339
1340 and ::
1341
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001342 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1343
1344 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1345 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1346 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1347 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1348
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001349 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1350 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1351 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1352 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1353 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1354
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001355 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1356 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001357 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1358 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001359
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001360Library
1361-------
1362
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001363- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1364 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1365
1366- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1367 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1368 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1369 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1370 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1371 See PEP 307 for details.
1372
1373- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1374 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1375
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001376- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1377 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001378 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001379 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1380 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001381 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001382
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001383- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1384 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1385
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001386- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1387 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1388 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1389
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001390- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1391
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001392- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1393 exception.
1394
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001395- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1396 class.
1397
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001398- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1399 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1400 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1401
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001402- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1403 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1404
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001405- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001406 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1407 See SF bug #659228.
1408
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001409- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1410 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1411 See SF patch #651082.
1412
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001413- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001414
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001415- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1416 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1417
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001418- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001419 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001420
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001421- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1422 DOS paths from other platforms.
1423
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001424Tools/Demos
1425-----------
1426
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001427- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1428 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1429 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1430 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1431 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1432 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1433 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1434 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1435 example:
1436
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001437 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1438 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001439
1440 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1441
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001442
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001443Build
1444-----
1445
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001446- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1447 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1448 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001449 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1450
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001451 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1452
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001453- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1454 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1455 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1456 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1457 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1458 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1459 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1460 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1461 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1462
1463- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1464 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1465 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1466 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1467
1468- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1469 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1470
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001471C API
1472-----
1473
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001474- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1475 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001476
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001477- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1478 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1479 tp_as_number pointer.
1480
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001481- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1482 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1483 (SF #681367)
1484
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001485- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1486 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1487 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1488 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001489
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001490Tests
1491-----
1492
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001493- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001494 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1495 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1496 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1497 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1498 pydoc.)
1499
1500- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1501
1502- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001503
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001504Windows
1505-------
1506
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001507- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1508 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1509 time).
1510
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001511- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1512 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1513
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001514- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1515 release without strong cryptography.
1516
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001517- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001518 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001519
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001520- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1521 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1522
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001523Mac
1524---
1525
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001526- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1527 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001528
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001529- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1530 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1531 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001532
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001533- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1534 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001535
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001536- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1537 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1538 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1539 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001540
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001541- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001542 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1543 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1544 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001545
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001546
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001547What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001548=================================
1549
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001550*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001551
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001552Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001553--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001554
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001555- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1556
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001557- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1558 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001559 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001560 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001561 a different meaning than before.
1562
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001563- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001564 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001565 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001566
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001567- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001568 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001569 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001570
1571- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1572 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1573 and deallocation.
1574
1575- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1576 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1577
1578- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1579 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1580 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1581 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1582 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1583
1584- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1585 now detected by the garbage collector.
1586
1587- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1588 [SF bug 519621]
1589
1590- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1591 identifier.
1592
1593- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1594 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1595 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1596 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1597 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1598 [SF bug 563060]
1599
1600- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1601 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1602 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1603 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1604 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1605
1606- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1607 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1608 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1609
1610- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1611
1612- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1613 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1614 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1615 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1616 state of the slots would be lost.)
1617
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001618Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001619-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001620
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001621- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001622 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1623 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1624 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1625 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001626 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1627 Jython 2.1.
1628
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001629- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001630 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001631 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1632 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1633 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1634 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1635 these, see PEP 302.
1636
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001637- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1638 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1639 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1640
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001641- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1642 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1643 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1644
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001645- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1646 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1647 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1648
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001649- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1650 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1651 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1652 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1653 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1654 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1655 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1656 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1657 releases or implementations.
1658
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001659- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001660 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1661 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001662
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001663- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1664 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1665
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001666- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1667 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1668 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1669
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001670- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1671 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1672
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001673- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1674 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001675 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1676 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001677
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001678- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1679 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1680 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1681 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1682 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1683
1684 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1685 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1686 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1687 pattern.
1688
1689 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1690 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1691 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1692 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1693
1694 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1695 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1696 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1697 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1698 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1699 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1700
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001701- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1702 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1703 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1704 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1705 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1706 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1707 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1708 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001709
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001710- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1711 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1712 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1713 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1714 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001715 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1716 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1717 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1718 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1719 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1720 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1721 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001722
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001723- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1724 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1725
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001726- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1727 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1728 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1729 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1730 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1731 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1732 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1733 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1734 to Zack Weinberg!
1735
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001736- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1737 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1738 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1739 type. This has been fixed now.
1740
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001741- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1742 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1743 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1744
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001745- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1746 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1747 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1748 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1749 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1750 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1751 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1752 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001753 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001754
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001755- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1756 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1757 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001758
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001759- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1760 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1761 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1762 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1763 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1764 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1765 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1766 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001767 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001768 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1769 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1770
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001771- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1772 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1773 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1774 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1775 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1776 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1777 this.)
1778
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001779- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1780 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001781 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001782 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001783 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1784 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001785 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1786 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001787
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001788- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1789 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1790 currently running.
1791
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001792- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1793 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1794 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1795 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1796
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001797- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1798 as directory names.
1799
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001800- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1801 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1802
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001803- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1804 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1805
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001806- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001807 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1808 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001809
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001810- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1811 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1812 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1813 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1814 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1815
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001816- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1817 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1818 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1819 removed.
1820
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001821- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1822 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1823 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1824
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001825- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1826 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1827 to __debug__.
1828
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001829- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1830 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1831 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1832
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001833- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1834 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1835 deprecated now.
1836
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001837- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1838 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1839 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001840
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001841- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1842 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1843 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1844 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1845 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001846
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001847- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1848 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1849
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001850- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1851 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1852 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001853 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001854 is backward compatible.
1855
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001856- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1857 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1858 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1859 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1860 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1861
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001862- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1863 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1864 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1865 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1866 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1867 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001868
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001869- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1870 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1871
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001872- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1873 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1874
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001875- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1876 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1877 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1878 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1879 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1880
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001881- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1882 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1883 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1884
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001885- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001886 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1887
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001888- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1889 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1890 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001891
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001892- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1893 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1894
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001895- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1896 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1897 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1898
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001899- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1900
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001901Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001902-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001903
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001904- Added three operators to the operator module:
1905 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1906 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1907 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1908
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001909- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1910
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001911- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1912 archives.
1913
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001914- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1915 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1916 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1917
1918 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1919
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001920- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1921 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1922 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001923 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001924
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001925- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1926 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1927 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1928 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001929 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1930 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1931 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1932 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001933
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001934- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1935 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001936
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001937- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1938
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001939- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1940 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1941
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001942- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1943 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1944 supported.
1945
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001946- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1947
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001948- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1949 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001950
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001951- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1952 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1953
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001954- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1955
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001956- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1957 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1958
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001959- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1960 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1961 functions but callable type objects.
1962
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001963- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001964 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001965 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001966
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001967- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1968 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001969
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001970- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1971 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001972
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001973- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1974 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1975 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1976 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1977
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001978- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1979 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001980
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001981- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1982 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1983 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1984 and __imul__.
1985
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001986- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001987 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1988 is called.
1989
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001990- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1991 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1992 interpreter was compiled.
1993
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001994- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1995 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1996 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001997 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001998 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1999 1, not 2.
2000
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002001- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2002 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2003 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2004 limit.
2005
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002006- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2007 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2008 bug #623464.
2009
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002010- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2011 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2012 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2013 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2014
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002015Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002017
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002018- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2019
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002020- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2021 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2022 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2023 with Python 2.3a2.
2024
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002025- os.path exposes getctime.
2026
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002027- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002028 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002029 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002030 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002031 unit tests of floating point results.
2032
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002033- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2034 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2035 has been increased.
2036
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002037- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2038 executed.
2039
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002040- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2041 postinstallation script.
2042
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002043- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2044 test the current module.
2045
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002046- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002047 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2048 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2049 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2050 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2051
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002052- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002053 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002054 Ward's Optik package.
2055
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002056- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2057 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2058 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2059 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2060
2061- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2062 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002063 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002064
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002065- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2066 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2067 shelf are binary pickles.
2068
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002069- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2070 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2071
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002072- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2073 modules are iterators now.
2074
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002075- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2076 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2077 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2078 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2079 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2080 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002081
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002082- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2083 with their entity value.
2084
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002085- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2086
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002087- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2088 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002089
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002090- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2091 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002092 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002093
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002094- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2095 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2096 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2097 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2098 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2099 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2100 main():
2101
2102 import locale
2103 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2104
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002105- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2106 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2107
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002108- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2109 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2110 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2111 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2112 to the new standard.
2113
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002114- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2115 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2116 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2117 an extension to the database.
2118
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002119- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2120 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2121 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2122 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002123 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002124
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002125- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002126 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002127
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002128- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2129 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2130 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2131 bounded integers.
2132
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002133- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2134 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2135 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2136 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2137 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2138 in existence.
2139
2140 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2141 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2142 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2143 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2144 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2145 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2146
2147 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2148 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2149 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2150 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2151
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002152- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2153 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2154 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2155
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002156- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2157
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002158- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2159 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2160 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2161 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2162
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002163- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2164 argument.
2165
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002166- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2167 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2168 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2169 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2170 [SF patch 560794].
2171
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002172- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2173 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2174 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002175 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2176 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2177 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002178
2179- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2180 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002181
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002182- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2183 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2184 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2185 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002186
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002187- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2188 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2189 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2190 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2191 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2192
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002193- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002194
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002195- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2196
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002197- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2198 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2199 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2200 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2201 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2202 identical to None.
2203
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002204- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2205 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2206 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2207 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2208 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2209 results now.
2210
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002211- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2212 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2213
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002214- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2215 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2216 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2217 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2218 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2219 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2220 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2221 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2222
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002223- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2224
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002225- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2226 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2227
2228- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2229 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2230 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2231 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2232 and other systems.
2233
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002234- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2235 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2236 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2237 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 +00002238 work well with these.
2239
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002240- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2241
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002242- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002243 connections.
2244
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002245- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2246 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2247 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2248
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002249- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2250 sets
2251
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002252- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2253 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2254 name.
2255
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002256- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2257 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2258 passed in.
2259
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002260- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002261 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002262 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2263 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002264
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002265- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2266
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002267- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2268
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002269- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2270 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2271 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2272
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002273- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2274 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2275 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2276 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002277 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002278
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002279- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002280 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002281 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002282
2283- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2284 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2285 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2286
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002287- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002288 the value of its expression argument.
2289
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002290- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2291 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2292 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2293
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002294- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2295 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2296 skipstone browser was included.
2297
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002298- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2299 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2300
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002301Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002302-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002303
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002304- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2305 names in addition to accepting file names.
2306
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002307- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2308 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2309 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2310 still used and useful.)
2311
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002312- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2313 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2314 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2315 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002316
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002317- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2318 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2319 the generated binary.
2320
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002321Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002322-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002323
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002324- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2325
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002326- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2327 except in the hands of experts.
2328
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002329- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002330 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2331 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2332 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002333
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002334- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2335 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2336 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2337 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2338 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2339 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2340 builds.
2341
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002342- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2343 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2344 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2345 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2346 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2347 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2348 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2349 new type.
2350
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002351- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002352
2353 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2354 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2355 positive infinities.
2356
2357 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2358 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2359 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2360 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2361 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2362 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2363 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2364
2365 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2366
2367 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2368
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002369- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2370 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2371 size of the executable.
2372
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002373- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2374 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2375 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2376 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002377
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002378- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2379
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002380- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2381 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2382 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002383
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002384- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2385 well as Unix.
2386
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002387- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2388 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2389 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2390 modules in the README file for details.
2391
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002392C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002393-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002394
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002395- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2396 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002397 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002398 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002399 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002400
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002401- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2402 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2403 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2404 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2405 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2406 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002407 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002408 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2409 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2410 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2411 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2412 aligned.)
2413
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002414- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2415 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2416 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2417
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002418- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2419 level.
2420
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002421- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2422 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2423 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2424 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2425 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2426
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002427- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2428 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2429 code.
2430
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002431- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2432 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2433 adjusting for negative indices.
2434
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002435- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2436 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2437 object.
2438
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002439- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2440 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2441 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2442
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002443- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2444 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002445
2446- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2447
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002448- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2449 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2450 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2451 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2452
2453- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2454
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002455- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002456
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002457- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002458 without going through the buffer API.
2459
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002460- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002461
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002462- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2463 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2464 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2465 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2466
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002467- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2468 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2469
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002470- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002471 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2472
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002473New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002474-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002475
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002476- OpenVMS is now supported.
2477
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002478- AtheOS is now supported.
2479
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002480- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2481
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002482- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2483
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002484Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002485-----
2486
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002487- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2488 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2489 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002490
2491Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002492-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002493
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002494- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2495 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2496 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2497 bugs.
2498 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002499 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002500 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2501 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002502 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002503
2504- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002505 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002506
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002507- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2508 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2509
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002510- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2511 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002512 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002513 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2514
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002515- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2516 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2517 use files" uninstall option).
2518
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002519- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2520
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002521- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2522 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2523
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002524- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2525 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2526 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2527
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002528- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2529 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2530 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2531 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2532 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002533 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2534 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2535 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002536
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002537- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002538 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002539 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2540 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2541 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2542 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2543 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2544 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2545 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2546 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2547 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2548 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2549 work around.
2550
2551- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2552 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2553 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2554 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2555 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2556 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2557 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2558 specified with O_CREAT too).
2559
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002560Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002561----
2562
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002563- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002564
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002565- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2566 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2567 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2568
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002569- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2570 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2571 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2572
2573- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2574 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2575 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2576 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2577 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2578 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2579 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2580 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002581
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002582- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2583 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2584 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002585
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002586- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2587 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2588 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2589 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2590 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002591
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002592- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2593 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2594 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002595
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002596- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2597 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002598
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002599- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2600 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2601 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2602 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2603 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002604
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002605- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2606 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2607 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2608
2609- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2610 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2611 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002612
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002613- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2614 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2615 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2616 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002617 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002618
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002619- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2620 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002621
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002622- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2623 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002624
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002625- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002626 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002627 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2628 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002629
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002630
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002631What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002632===============================
2633
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002634*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2635
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002636Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002637--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002638
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002639- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2640 with a custom metaclass.
2641
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002642Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002643-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002644
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002645- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2646 are proxies.
2647
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002648Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002650
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002651- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2652 very short strings.
2653
2654- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2655 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2656 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2657 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2658 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2659
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002660Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002662
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002663- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2664 close or delete time).
2665
2666- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2667 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2668
2669- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2670
2671- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002672 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002673
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002674Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002675-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002676
2677Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002678-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002679
2680C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002681-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002682
2683New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002684-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002685
2686Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002688
2689Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002690-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002691
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002692- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2693
2694- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2695 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2696
2697- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2698 deleted at process exit time.
2699
2700- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2701 in backslash.
2702
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002703Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002704----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002705
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002706- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2707 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2708 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2709
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002710
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002711What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002712===========================
2713
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002714*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2715
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002716Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002717--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002718
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002719- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2720 been extensively updated. See
2721
2722 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2723
2724 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2725
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002726- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2727 deleted!
2728
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002729- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2730 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2731 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2732 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2733 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2734
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002735- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2736
2737 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2738 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2739
2740 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2741 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2742 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2743 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2744 supported anyway.
2745
2746 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2747 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2748
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002749- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2750 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2751 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2752 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2753 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002754
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002755- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2756 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2757 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2758
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002759Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002761
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002762- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2763 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2764 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2765 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2766 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2767 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002768 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2769 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2770 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2771 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002772
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002773- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2774 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2775 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2776
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002777Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002778-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002779
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002780- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2781
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002782Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002783-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002784
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002785- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2786 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2787 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2788 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2789 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2790 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2791
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002792- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2793
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002794- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2795
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002796- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2797
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002798- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2799 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2800 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2801
2802- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2803
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002804Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002805-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002806
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002807- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2808 off a search on Google.
2809
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002810Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002812
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002813- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2814 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2815 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2816 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2817 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2818 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2819 other platforms should do likewise.
2820
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002821- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2822 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2823 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2824
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002825C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002827
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002828- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2829 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2830 producing key-value pairs.
2831
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002832- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002833 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002834 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2835 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2836 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2837 previously went unchallenged.
2838
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002839New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002840-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002841
2842Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002843-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002844
2845Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002846-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002847
2848Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002850
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002851- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2852 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002853
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002854- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2855 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2856 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2857 home.
2858
2859
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002860What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002861===========================
2862
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002863*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2864
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002865Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002866--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002867
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002868- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2869 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002870
2871 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002872 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002873
2874 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2875 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002876 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002877 This needs to be documented.
2878
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002879- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2880 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2881
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002882- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2883 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2884 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2885
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002886- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2887 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2888
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002889- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2890 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2891 class forbids it).
2892
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002893- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2894 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2895 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2896
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002897- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2898
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002899Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002901
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002902- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2903 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002904 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002905
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002906- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2907 (like 1 + '').
2908
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002909Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002910-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002911
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002912- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2913 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2914 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2915 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002916 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002917 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2918
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002919- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2920 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2921 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2922 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2923
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002924- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2925 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002926 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2927 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2928 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002929
2930- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2931 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002932
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002933- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2934 bytes on its input.
2935
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002936Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002938
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002939- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002940 convenience function.
2941
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002942- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2943 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2944 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002945 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2946 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2947 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2948 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2949 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2950 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002951
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002952- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2953 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2954 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2955 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2956
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002957- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2958 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2959 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2960
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002961- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2962 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2963 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2964 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2965
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002966- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2967 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002968 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002969 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2970 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2971 new -l and -e options.
2972
2973- statcache is now deprecated.
2974
2975- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2976 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002977 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002978 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2979 time properly taken into account.
2980
2981- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2982 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2983 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2984 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2985
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002986Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002987-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002988
2989Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002991
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002992- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2993 is built with libdb3 if available.
2994
2995- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2996
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002997C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002999
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003000- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3001 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3002 PySequence_Size().
3003
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003004- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3005
3006- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3007 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3008 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3009
3010- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3011 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3012
3013- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3014 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3015
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003016New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003018
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003019- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3020 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3021
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003022- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3023 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3024
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003025- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3026
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003027Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003029
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003030- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3031 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3032
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003033Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003034-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003035
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003036Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003038
3039- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3040 removed completely in the next release.
3041
3042- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3043 OSX.
3044
3045- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3046 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3047
3048- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3049
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003050
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003051What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003052===========================
3053
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3055
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003056Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003057--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003058
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003059- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003060 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003061 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003062 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3063 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003064 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3065 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003066 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3067 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003068
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003069- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3070 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3071
3072- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3073 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3074
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003075Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003077
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003078- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3079 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3080 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3081 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3082 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3083 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3084 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3085 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3086
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003087- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3088 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3089 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3090 example).
3091
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003092- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003093 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003094 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003095 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003096
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003097- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3098 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3099 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003100 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003101
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003102- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3103 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3104 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3105 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3106 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3107 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3108
3109 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3110
3111 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3112
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003113Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003115
3116- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3117
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003118- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3119
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003120- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3121 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003122
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003123- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3124 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3125 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3126 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3127 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3128 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003129 attributes.
3130
3131- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3132 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3133 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003134
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003135- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3136 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3137 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003138
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003139- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3140 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3141 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003142 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3143 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3144
3145- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3146 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003147
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003148Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003150
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003151- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3152 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3153
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003154- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3155 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3156 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3157 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3158
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003159- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3160 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3161 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3162 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3163
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003164 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3165 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3166 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3167 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3168 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3169 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3170 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3171 without losing information).
3172
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003173- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003174 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3175 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3176 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3177 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3178 module).
3179
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003180 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003181 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3182 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3183 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3184 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003185
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003186- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003187 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3188 encoding.
3189
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003190- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3191 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3192
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003194 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3195
3196- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3197 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3198 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3199 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3200
3201- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3202
3203- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3204 ON, and OFF.
3205
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003206- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3207 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3208
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003209Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003211
3212- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3213 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3214 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003215
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003216- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3217 been added: -X and -E.
3218
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003219Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003221
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003222- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3223 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3224
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003225C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003227
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003228- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3229 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3230 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3231 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3232 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3233
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003234- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3235 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3236 as long) arguments.
3237
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003238- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3239 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3240 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3241 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3242 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3243 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3244
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003245- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3246 input.
3247
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003248New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003250
3251Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003253
3254Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003256
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003257- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3258 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3259 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3260
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003261- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3262 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3263 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003264 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003265
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3267 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3268 import signal
3269 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003270
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003272 while 1:
3273 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003275 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3276 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3277 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3278 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003279
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003280
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003281What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3282===========================
3283
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3285
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003286Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003287--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003288
3289- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3290 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3291 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3292
3293- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3294 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3295 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3296 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3297 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3298 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3299 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003300
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003301- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003302 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003303 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3304 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3305 associate a docstring with a property.
3306
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003307- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3308 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3309 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3310 other built-in object types.
3311
3312- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3313 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3314 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3315 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3316 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3317
3318- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3319 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3320
3321- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3322 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003323 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003324 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3325 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3326 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3327 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3328 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3329
3330- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3331 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3332 class.
3333
3334- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3335 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3336 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3337 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3338
3339- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3340 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3341 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3342 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3343
3344- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3345 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3346
3347- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3348 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3349 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3350 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3351 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003352 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003353 with the same value as s.
3354
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003355- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3356
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003357Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003358----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003359
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003360- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3361
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003362- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3363 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3364 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3365 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3366 objects.
3367
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003368- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3369 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003370 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3371 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3372
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003373- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3374 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3375 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3376
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003377Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003379
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003380- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3381 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3382 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3383 by the instances.
3384
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003385- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3386 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3387 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3388
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003389- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3390 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3391 before the entire comparison is complete.
3392
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003393- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3394 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3395 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3396
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003397- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3398 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3399 getwriter().
3400
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003401- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3402 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3403
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003404- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003405 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3406 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3407
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003408- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3409 iterable object.
3410
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003411- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3412 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003413
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003414- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3415 authentication.
3416
3417- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3418 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003419
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003420- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003421 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3422 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3423 a sample driver.)
3424
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003425Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003427
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003428- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3429 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3430 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3431 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3432 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3433 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3434 kernel has large file support.
3435
3436- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3437 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3438 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3439 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3440 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3441
3442- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3443 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3444 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3445
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003446C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003447-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003448
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003449- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3450 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3451
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003452New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003454
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003455- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3456 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3457
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003458Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003460
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003461- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3462 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3463 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3464 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3465 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3466
3467- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3468 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3469 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3470 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3471
3472- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3473 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3474
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003475Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003477
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003478- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003479 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3480 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003481
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003482
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003483What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3484===========================
3485
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3487
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003488Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003490
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003491- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3492 big to represent as a C double.
3493
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003494- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3495 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3496 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3497 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3498 restriction).
3499
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003500- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3501 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3502 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3503 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3504 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3505
3506 >>> dir([])
3507 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3508 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3509 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3510 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3511 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3512 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3513 'reverse', 'sort']
3514
3515 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3516
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003517- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003518 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3519 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3520 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3521 OverflowError exception.
3522
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003523- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003524 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003525 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3526 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3527 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3528 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3529 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003530 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3532 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3533
3534 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3535 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3536 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3537 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003538
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003539- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003540 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3541 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3542 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3543 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3544 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3545 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3546 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3547 once it is created.
3548
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003549- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3550 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3551 (key, value) pairs.
3552
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003553- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003554 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3555 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3556
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003557- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3558 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3559 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3560 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3561 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003562
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003563- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003564 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3565 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3566
3567 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3568
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003569- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003570 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3571
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003572Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003574
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003575- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003576 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3577 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003578
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003579- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3580 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3581 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3582 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3583 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3584 in this area anymore).
3585
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003586- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3587 threading.Timer.
3588
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003589- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3590 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3591
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003592- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003593 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3594
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003595- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003596 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3597 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3598 converted to Python longs.
3599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003600- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003601 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3602
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003603- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3604 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3605 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3606
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003607Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003609
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003610- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3611 division operators as per PEP 238.
3612
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003613Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003615
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003616- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3617 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3618 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3619 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3620
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003621C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003623
3624- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003625
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003626- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3627 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003628 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003629
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3631 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003632 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003635- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003636 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3637 module:
3638
3639 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003640
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003641 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3642 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003643
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003644 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3645 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003646
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003647 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3648
3649 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3650
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003651- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003652 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3653 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3654 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003655
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003656New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003658
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003659- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3660 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3661 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3662 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3663 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003664
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003665Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003666-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003667
3668Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003670
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003671- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3672 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3673 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3674 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003675 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3676 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3677 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3678 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3679 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003680
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003681- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003682 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3683
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003684
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003685What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3686===========================
3687
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3689
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003690Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003692
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003693- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3694 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3695
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003696- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3697 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3698 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003699
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003700- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3701 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3702 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3703 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003704
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003705- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3706
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003708
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003709Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003711
3712- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003713 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003714 the module docstring for details.
3715
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003716Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003718
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003719- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003720 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3721 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3722 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003723
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003724- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3725 Nick Mathewson.
3726
3727Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003729
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003730- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3731 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3732 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3733 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3734 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3735 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3736 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3737 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3738
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003739- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3740 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3741 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3742 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3743
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003744- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3745 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3746 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3747 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3748 come a long way).
3749
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003750- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3751 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3752 write filters for these warnings).
3753
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003754- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3755 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3756 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3757 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3758 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3759
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003760- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3761 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3762 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3763 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3764 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3765 older distribution.
3766
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003767Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003769
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003770- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3771 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003772 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003773
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003774- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3775 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3776 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3777
3778- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3779
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003780- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3781
3782- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3783
3784- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003787
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003788- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3789
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003790New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003792
3793C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003795
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003796- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3797 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3798 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3799 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3800 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3801 against buffer overruns.
3802
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003803- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003804 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3805 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003806 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3807 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3808 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3809
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003810- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3811 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3812 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3813 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3814 deprecated.
3815
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003816Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003818
3819- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3820 relevant is found.
3821
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003822
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003823What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003824===========================
3825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003826*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3827
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003828Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003829----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003830
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003831- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3832 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3833 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3834 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3835 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3836 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3837 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3838 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003839 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003840 repaired.
3841
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003842- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003843 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003844 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3845 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3846 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3847 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3848 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3849 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3850 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3851 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3852
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003853- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3854 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3855 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3856 leading BMO character).
3857
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003858- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3859 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3860 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3861
3862 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3863 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3864 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003865
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003866 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3867 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3868 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3869 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3870 for various simple to use conversions.
3871
3872 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3873 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3874
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3876 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3877 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3878 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3879 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3880 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3881 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3882 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3883 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3884 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3885 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3886 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3887 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3888 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3889 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003890
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003891- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3892 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3893 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003894 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003895 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003896
3897 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003898 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3899 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3900 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3901 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3902 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003903 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3904 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003905
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003906 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3907 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3908 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003909 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003910
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003911- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3912 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3913 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3914 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3915 floating arithmetic,
3916
3917 x = 9007199254740992.0
3918 print long(x)
3919
3920 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3921 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3922 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3923 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3924 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3925 functions are of good quality).
3926
3927 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3928 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3929 algorithms to break.
3930
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003931- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3932 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3933 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3934 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3935 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3936 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3937 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3938 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3939 order.
3940
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003941- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3942 operation along the most common code paths.
3943
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003944- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3945 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3946
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003947- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3948 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3949 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3950 {}.update(UserDict())
3951
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003952- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3953 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3954 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3955 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3956 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3957 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3958 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3959 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3960
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003961- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003962 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003964 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003965 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3966 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003967 join() method of strings
3968 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003969 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3970 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003972 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003973
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003974- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3975 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3976
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003977- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3978 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3979
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003980- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3981 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3982 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3983 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3984
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003985- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3986 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003987 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003988 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3989 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003990
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003991- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3992
3993
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003994Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003996
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003997- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003998 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003999 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4000 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4001
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004002- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4003 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4004
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004005- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4006 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4007 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4008 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4009
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004010- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4011 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4012 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4013
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004014- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4015
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004016- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4017
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004018- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4019 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4020 that are still imported into string.py).
4021
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004022- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4023
4024- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4025 Now it does.
4026
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004027- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4028
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004029- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4030 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4031 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4032 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4033 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004034 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4035 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004036
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004037- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4038 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4039 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4040 'help(object)'.
4041
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004042Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004044
4045- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004046 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004047 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4048 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4049
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004050- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004051 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4052 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004053
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004054C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004056
4057- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4058 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059
4060----
4061
4062**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**