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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +000015- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
16 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
17
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +000018- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
19
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000020- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
21
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000022- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
23 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
24 arguments.
25
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000026- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
27 See SF bug #667147.
28
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000029- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +000030 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000031 See SF bug #676155.
32
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000033Extension modules
34-----------------
35
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +000036- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +000037 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +000038 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
39 patch #678531.)
40
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +000041- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
42 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
43
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +000044- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
45 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
46
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +000047- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
48 library.
49
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000050- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
51
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000052- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
53 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
54 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
55
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000056- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
57
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +000058- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
59 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
60
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000061- datetime changes:
62
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000063 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
64 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
65 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
66 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
67 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
68 now.
69
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000070 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000071 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
72 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000073
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000074 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000075 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000076 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
77 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
78 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
79 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000080
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000081 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
82 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
83 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000084 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
85
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000086 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
87 by a later example coded by Guido.
88
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000089 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000090 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
91 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
92 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000093 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
94 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
95
96 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
97 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
98 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
99 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
100 tzinfo subclass instance.
101
102 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
103 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
104 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
105 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
106 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
107 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
108 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
109 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000110
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000111 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
112 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
113 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
114 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
115 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
116 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
117 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
118 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
119 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
120 as a naive datetime object.
121
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000122 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
123 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
124 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
125
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000126 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
127 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
128 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
129 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
130 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
131 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
132 comparison.
133
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000134 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
135 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
136 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
137 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
138 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
139
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000140 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
141 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000142 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
143 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000144
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000145Library
146-------
147
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000148- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
149 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
150 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
151
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000152- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
153
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000154- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
155 exception.
156
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000157- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
158 class.
159
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000160- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
161 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
162 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
163
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000164- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
165 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
166
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000167- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
168 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
169 See SF bug #659228.
170
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000171- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
172 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
173 See SF patch #651082.
174
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000175- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000176
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000177- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
178 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
179
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000180- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000181 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000182
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000183Tools/Demos
184-----------
185
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000186- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
187 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
188 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
189 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
190 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
191 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
192 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
193 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
194 example:
195
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000196 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
197 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000198
199 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
200
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000201
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000202Build
203-----
204
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000205- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
206 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
207 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
208 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
209 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
210 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
211 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
212 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
213 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
214
215- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
216 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
217 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
218 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
219
220- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
221 from the Tools/scripts directory.
222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000223C API
224-----
225
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000226- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
227 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
228 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
229 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000230
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000231
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000232New platforms
233-------------
234
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000235TBD
236
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000237Tests
238-----
239
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000240TBD
241
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000242Windows
243-------
244
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000245- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
246 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
247
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000248- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
249 release without strong cryptography.
250
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000251- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
252 absolute pathname.
253
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000254- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
255 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000257Mac
258---
259
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000260- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
261 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000262
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000263- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
264 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000265
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000266
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000267What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000268=================================
269
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000270*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000271
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000272Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000273--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000274
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000275- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
276
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000277- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
278 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000279 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000280 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000281 a different meaning than before.
282
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000283- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000284 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000285 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000286
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000287- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000288 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000289 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000290
291- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
292 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
293 and deallocation.
294
295- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
296 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
297
298- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
299 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
300 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
301 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
302 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
303
304- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
305 now detected by the garbage collector.
306
307- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
308 [SF bug 519621]
309
310- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
311 identifier.
312
313- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
314 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
315 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
316 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
317 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
318 [SF bug 563060]
319
320- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
321 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
322 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
323 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
324 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
325
326- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
327 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
328 not called. [SF bug #537450]
329
330- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
331
332- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
333 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
334 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
335 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
336 state of the slots would be lost.)
337
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000338Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000339-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000340
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000341- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000342 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
343 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
344 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
345 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000346 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
347 Jython 2.1.
348
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000349- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000350 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000351 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
352 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
353 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
354 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
355 these, see PEP 302.
356
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000357- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
358 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
359 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
360
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000361- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
362 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
363 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
364
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000365- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
366 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
367 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
368
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000369- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
370 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
371 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
372 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
373 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
374 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
375 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
376 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
377 releases or implementations.
378
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000379- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000380 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
381 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000382
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000383- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
384 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
385
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000386- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
387 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
388 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
389
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000390- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
391 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
392
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000393- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
394 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000395 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
396 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000397
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000398- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
399 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
400 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
401 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
402 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
403
404 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
405 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
406 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
407 pattern.
408
409 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
410 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
411 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
412 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
413
414 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
415 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
416 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
417 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
418 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
419 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
420
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000421- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
422 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
423 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
424 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
425 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
426 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
427 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
428 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000429
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000430- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
431 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
432 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
433 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
434 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000435 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
436 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
437 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
438 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
439 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
440 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
441 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000442
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000443- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
444 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
445
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000446- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
447 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
448 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
449 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
450 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
451 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
452 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
453 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
454 to Zack Weinberg!
455
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000456- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
457 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
458 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
459 type. This has been fixed now.
460
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000461- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
462 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
463 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
464
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000465- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
466 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
467 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
468 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
469 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
470 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
471 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
472 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000473 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000474
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000475- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
476 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
477 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000478
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000479- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
480 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
481 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
482 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
483 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
484 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
485 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
486 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000487 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000488 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
489 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
490
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000491- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
492 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
493 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
494 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
495 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
496 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
497 this.)
498
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000499- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
500 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000501 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000502 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000503 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
504 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000505 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
506 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000507
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000508- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
509 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
510 currently running.
511
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000512- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
513 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
514 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
515 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
516
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000517- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
518 as directory names.
519
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000520- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
521 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
522
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000523- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
524 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
525
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000526- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000527 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
528 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000529
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000530- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
531 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
532 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
533 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
534 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
535
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000536- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
537 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
538 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
539 removed.
540
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000541- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
542 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
543 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
544
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000545- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
546 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
547 to __debug__.
548
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000549- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
550 string to the left with zeros. For example,
551 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
552
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000553- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
554 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
555 deprecated now.
556
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000557- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
558 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
559 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000560
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000561- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
562 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
563 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
564 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
565 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000566
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000567- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
568 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
569
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000570- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
571 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
572 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000573 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000574 is backward compatible.
575
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000576- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
577 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
578 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
579 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
580 could access a pointer to freed memory.
581
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000582- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
583 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
584 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
585 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
586 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
587 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000588
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000589- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
590 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
591
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000592- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
593 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
594
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000595- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
596 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
597 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
598 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
599 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
600
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000601- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
602 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
603 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
604
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000605- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000606 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
607
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000608- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
609 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
610 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000611
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000612- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
613 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
614
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000615- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
616 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
617 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
618
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000619- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000621Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000622-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000623
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000624- Added three operators to the operator module:
625 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
626 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
627 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
628
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000629- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
630
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000631- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
632 archives.
633
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000634- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
635 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
636 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
637
638 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
639
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000640- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
641 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
642 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000643 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000644
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000645- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
646 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
647 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
648 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000649 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
650 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
651 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
652 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000653
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000654- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
655 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000656
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000657- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
658
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000659- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
660 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
661
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000662- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
663 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
664 supported.
665
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000666- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
667
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000668- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
669 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000670
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000671- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
672 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
673
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000674- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
675
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000676- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
677 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
678
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000679- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
680 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
681 functions but callable type objects.
682
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000683- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000684 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000685 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000686
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000687- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
688 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000689
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000690- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
691 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000692
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000693- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
694 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
695 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
696 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
697
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000698- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
699 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000700
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000701- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
702 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
703 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
704 and __imul__.
705
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000706- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000707 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
708 is called.
709
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000710- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
711 been added where available.
712
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000713- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
714 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
715 interpreter was compiled.
716
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000717- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
718 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
719 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000720 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000721 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
722 1, not 2.
723
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000724- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
725 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
726 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
727 limit.
728
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000729- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
730 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
731 bug #623464.
732
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000733- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
734 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
735 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
736 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
737
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000738Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000739-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000740
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000741- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
742
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000743- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
744 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
745 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
746 with Python 2.3a2.
747
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000748- os.path exposes getctime.
749
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000750- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
751 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
752 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
753 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
754 unit tests of floating point results.
755
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000756- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
757 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
758 has been increased.
759
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000760- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
761 executed.
762
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000763- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
764 postinstallation script.
765
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000766- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
767 test the current module.
768
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000769- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
770 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
771 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
772 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
773 this behavior needs to be controlled.
774
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000775- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000776 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000777 Ward's Optik package.
778
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000779- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
780 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
781 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
782 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
783
784- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
785 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000786 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000787
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000788- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
789 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
790 shelf are binary pickles.
791
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000792- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
793 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
794
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000795- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
796 modules are iterators now.
797
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000798- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
799 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
800 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
801 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
802 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
803 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000804
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000805- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
806 with their entity value.
807
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000808- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
809
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000810- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
811 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000812
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000813- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
814 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000815 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000816
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000817- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
818 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
819 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
820 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
821 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
822 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
823 main():
824
825 import locale
826 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
827
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000828- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
829 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
830
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000831- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
832 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
833 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
834 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
835 to the new standard.
836
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000837- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
838 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
839 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
840 an extension to the database.
841
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000842- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
843 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
844 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
845 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000846 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000847
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000848- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000849 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000850
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000851- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
852 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
853 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
854 bounded integers.
855
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000856- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
857 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
858 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
859 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
860 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
861 in existence.
862
863 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
864 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
865 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
866 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
867 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
868 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
869
870 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
871 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
872 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
873 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
874
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000875- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
876 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
877 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
878
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000879- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
880
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000881- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
882 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
883 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
884 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
885
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000886- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
887 argument.
888
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000889- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
890 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
891 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
892 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
893 [SF patch 560794].
894
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000895- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
896 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
897 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000898 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
899 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
900 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000901
902- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
903 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000904
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000905- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
906 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
907 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
908 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000909
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000910- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
911 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
912 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
913 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
914 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
915
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000916- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000917
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000918- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
919
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000920- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
921 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
922 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
923 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
924 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
925 identical to None.
926
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000927- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
928 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
929 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
930 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
931 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
932 results now.
933
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000934- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
935 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
936
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000937- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
938 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
939 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
940 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
941 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
942 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
943 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
944 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
945
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000946- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
947
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000948- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
949 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
950
951- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
952 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
953 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
954 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
955 and other systems.
956
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000957- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
958 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
959 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
960 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 +0000961 work well with these.
962
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000963- compileall now supports quiet operation.
964
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000965- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000966 connections.
967
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000968- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
969 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
970 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
971
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000972- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
973 sets
974
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000975- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
976 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
977 name.
978
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000979- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
980 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
981 passed in.
982
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000983- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000984 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000985 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
986 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000987
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000988- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
989
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000990- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
991
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000992- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
993 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
994 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
995
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000996- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
997 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
998 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
999 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001000 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001001
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001002- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001003 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001004 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001005
1006- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1007 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1008 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1009
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001010- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001011 the value of its expression argument.
1012
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001013- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1014 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1015 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1016
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001017- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1018 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1019 skipstone browser was included.
1020
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001021- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1022 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1023
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001024Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001025-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001026
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001027- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1028 names in addition to accepting file names.
1029
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001030- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1031 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1032 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1033 still used and useful.)
1034
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001035- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1036 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1037 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1038 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001039
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001040- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1041 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1042 the generated binary.
1043
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001044Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001045-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001046
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001047- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1048
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001049- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1050 except in the hands of experts.
1051
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001052- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001053 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1054 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1055 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001056
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001057- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1058 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1059 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1060 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1061 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1062 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1063 builds.
1064
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001065- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1066 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1067 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1068 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1069 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1070 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1071 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1072 new type.
1073
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001074- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001075
1076 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1077 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1078 positive infinities.
1079
1080 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1081 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1082 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1083 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1084 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1085 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1086 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1087
1088 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1089
1090 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1091
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001092- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1093 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1094 size of the executable.
1095
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001096- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1097 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1098 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1099 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001100
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001101- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1102
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001103- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1104 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1105 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001106
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001107- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1108 well as Unix.
1109
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001110- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1111 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1112 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1113 modules in the README file for details.
1114
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001115C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001116-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001117
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001118- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1119 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001120 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001121 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001122 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001123
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001124- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1125 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1126 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1127 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1128 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1129 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1130 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1131 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1132 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1133 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1134 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1135 aligned.)
1136
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001137- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1138 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1139 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1140
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001141- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1142 level.
1143
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001144- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1145 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1146 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1147 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1148 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1149
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001150- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1151 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1152 code.
1153
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001154- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1155 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1156 adjusting for negative indices.
1157
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001158- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1159 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1160 object.
1161
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001162- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1163 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1164 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1165
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001166- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1167 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001168
1169- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1170
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001171- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1172 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1173 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1174 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1175
1176- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1177
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001178- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001179
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001180- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001181 without going through the buffer API.
1182
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001183- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001184
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001185- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1186 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1187 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1188 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1189
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001190- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1191 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1192
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001193- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001194 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1195
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001196New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001197-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001198
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001199- OpenVMS is now supported.
1200
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001201- AtheOS is now supported.
1202
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001203- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1204
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001205- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1206
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001207Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001208-----
1209
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001210- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1211 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1212 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001213
1214Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001215-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001216
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001217- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1218 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1219 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1220 bugs.
1221 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001222 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1223 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1224 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001225 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001226
1227- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001228 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001229
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001230- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1231 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1232
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001233- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1234 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1235 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1236 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1237
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001238- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1239 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1240 use files" uninstall option).
1241
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001242- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1243
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001244- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1245 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1246
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001247- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1248 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1249 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1250
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001251- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1252 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1253 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1254 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1255 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001256 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1257 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1258 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001259
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001260- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001261 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001262 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1263 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1264 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1265 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1266 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1267 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1268 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1269 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1270 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1271 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1272 work around.
1273
1274- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1275 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1276 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1277 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1278 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1279 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1280 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1281 specified with O_CREAT too).
1282
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001283Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001284----
1285
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001286- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001287
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001288- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1289 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1290 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1291
1292- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1293 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1294 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1295 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1296 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1297 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1298 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1299 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001300
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001301- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1302 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1303 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001304
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001305- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1306 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1307 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1308 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1309 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001310
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001311- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1312 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1313 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001314
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001315- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1316 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001317
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001318- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1319 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1320 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1321 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1322 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001323
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001324- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1325 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1326 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1327
1328- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1329 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1330 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001331
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001332- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1333 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1334 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1335 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1336 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001337
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001338- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1339 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001340
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001341- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1342 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001343
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001344- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1345 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1346 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1347 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001348
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001349What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001350===============================
1351
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001352*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1353
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001354Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001355--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001356
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001357- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1358 with a custom metaclass.
1359
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001360Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001361-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001362
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001363- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1364 are proxies.
1365
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001366Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001367-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001368
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001369- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1370 very short strings.
1371
1372- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1373 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1374 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1375 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1376 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1377
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001378Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001379-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001380
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001381- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1382 close or delete time).
1383
1384- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1385 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1386
1387- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1388
1389- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001390 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001391
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001392Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001393-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001394
1395Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001396-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001397
1398C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001399-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001400
1401New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001402-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001403
1404Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001405-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001406
1407Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001408-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001409
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001410- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1411
1412- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1413 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1414
1415- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1416 deleted at process exit time.
1417
1418- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1419 in backslash.
1420
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001421Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001422----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001423
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001424- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1425 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1426 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1427
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001428
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001429What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001430===========================
1431
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001432*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1433
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001434Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001435--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001436
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001437- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1438 been extensively updated. See
1439
1440 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1441
1442 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1443
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001444- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1445 deleted!
1446
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001447- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1448 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1449 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1450 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1451 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1452
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001453- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1454
1455 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1456 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1457
1458 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1459 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1460 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1461 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1462 supported anyway.
1463
1464 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1465 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1466
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001467- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1468 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1469 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1470 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1471 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001472
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001473- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1474 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1475 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1476
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001477Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001478-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001479
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001480- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1481 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1482 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1483 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1484 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1485 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001486 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1487 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1488 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1489 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001490
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001491- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1492 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1493 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1494
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001495Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001496-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001497
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001498- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1499
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001500Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001501-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001502
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001503- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1504 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1505 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1506 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1507 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1508 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1509
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001510- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1511
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001512- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1513
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001514- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1515
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001516- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1517 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1518 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1519
1520- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1521
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001522Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001523-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001524
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001525- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1526 off a search on Google.
1527
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001528Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001529-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001530
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001531- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1532 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1533 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1534 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1535 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1536 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1537 other platforms should do likewise.
1538
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001539- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1540 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1541 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1542
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001543C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001544-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001545
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001546- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1547 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1548 producing key-value pairs.
1549
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001550- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001551 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001552 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1553 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1554 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1555 previously went unchallenged.
1556
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001557New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001558-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001559
1560Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001561-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001562
1563Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001564-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001565
1566Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001567----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001568
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001569- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1570 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001571
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001572- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1573 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1574 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1575 home.
1576
1577
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001578What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001579===========================
1580
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001581*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1582
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001583Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001584--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001585
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001586- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1587 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001588
1589 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001590 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001591
1592 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1593 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001594 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001595 This needs to be documented.
1596
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001597- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1598 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1599
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001600- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1601 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1602 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1603
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001604- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1605 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1606
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001607- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1608 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1609 class forbids it).
1610
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001611- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1612 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1613 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1614
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001615- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1616
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001617Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001618-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001619
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001620- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1621 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001622 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001623
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001624- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1625 (like 1 + '').
1626
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001627Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001628-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001629
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001630- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1631 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1632 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1633 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001634 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001635 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1636
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001637- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1638 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1639 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1640 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1641
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001642- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1643 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001644 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1645 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1646 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001647
1648- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1649 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001650
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001651- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1652 bytes on its input.
1653
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001654Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001656
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001657- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001658 convenience function.
1659
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001660- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1661 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1662 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001663 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1664 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1665 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1666 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1667 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1668 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001669
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001670- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1671 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1672 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1673 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1674
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001675- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1676 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1677 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1678
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001679- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1680 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1681 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1682 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1683
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001684- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1685 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001686 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001687 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1688 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1689 new -l and -e options.
1690
1691- statcache is now deprecated.
1692
1693- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1694 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001695 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001696 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1697 time properly taken into account.
1698
1699- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1700 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1701 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1702 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1703
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001704Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001705-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001706
1707Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001708-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001709
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001710- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1711 is built with libdb3 if available.
1712
1713- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1714
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001715C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001716-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001717
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001718- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1719 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1720 PySequence_Size().
1721
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001722- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1723
1724- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1725 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1726 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1727
1728- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1729 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1730
1731- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1732 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1733
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001734New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001735-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001736
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001737- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1738 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1739
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001740- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1741 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1742
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001743- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1744
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001745Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001746-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001747
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001748- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1749 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1750
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001751Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001752-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001753
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001754Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001755----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001756
1757- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1758 removed completely in the next release.
1759
1760- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1761 OSX.
1762
1763- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1764 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1765
1766- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1767
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001768
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001769What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001770===========================
1771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001772*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1773
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001774Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001775--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001776
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001777- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001778 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001779 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001780 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1781 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001782 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1783 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001784 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1785 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001786
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001787- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1788 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1789
1790- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1791 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1792
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001793Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001794-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001795
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001796- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1797 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1798 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1799 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1800 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1801 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1802 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1803 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1804
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001805- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1806 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1807 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1808 example).
1809
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001810- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001811 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001812 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001813 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001814
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001815- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1816 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1817 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001818 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001819
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001820- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1821 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1822 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1823 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1824 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1825 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1826
1827 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1828
1829 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1830
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001831Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001832-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001833
1834- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1835
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001836- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1837
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001838- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1839 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001840
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001841- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1842 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1843 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1844 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1845 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1846 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001847 attributes.
1848
1849- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1850 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1851 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001852
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001853- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1854 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1855 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001856
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001857- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1858 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1859 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001860 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1861 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1862
1863- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1864 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001865
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001866Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001867-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001868
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001869- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1870 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1871
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001872- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1873 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1874 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1875 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1876
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001877- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1878 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1879 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1880 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1881
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001882 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1883 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1884 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1885 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1886 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1887 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1888 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1889 without losing information).
1890
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001891- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001892 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1893 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1894 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1895 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1896 module).
1897
1898 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1899 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1900 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1901 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1902 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001903
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001904- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001905 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1906 encoding.
1907
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001908- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1909 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1910
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001911- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001912 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1913
1914- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1915 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1916 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1917 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1918
1919- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1920
1921- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1922 ON, and OFF.
1923
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001924- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1925 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1926
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001927Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001928-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001929
1930- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1931 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1932 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001933
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001934- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1935 been added: -X and -E.
1936
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001937Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001938-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001939
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001940- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1941 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1942
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001943C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001944-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001945
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001946- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1947 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1948 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1949 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1950 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1951
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001952- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1953 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1954 as long) arguments.
1955
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001956- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1957 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1958 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1959 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1960 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1961 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1962
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001963- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1964 input.
1965
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001966New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001967-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001968
1969Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001970-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001971
1972Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001973-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001974
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001975- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1976 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1977 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1978
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001979- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1980 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1981 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001982 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001983
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001984 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1985 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1986 import signal
1987 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001988
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001989 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001990 while 1:
1991 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001992 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001993 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1994 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1995 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1996 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001997
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001998
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001999What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2000===========================
2001
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002002*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2003
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002004Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002005--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002006
2007- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2008 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2009 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2010
2011- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2012 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2013 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2014 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2015 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2016 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2017 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002018
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002019- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002020 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002021 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2022 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2023 associate a docstring with a property.
2024
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002025- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2026 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2027 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2028 other built-in object types.
2029
2030- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2031 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2032 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2033 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2034 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2035
2036- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2037 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2038
2039- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2040 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002041 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002042 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2043 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2044 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2045 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2046 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2047
2048- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2049 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2050 class.
2051
2052- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2053 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2054 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2055 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2056
2057- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2058 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2059 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2060 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2061
2062- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2063 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2064
2065- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2066 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2067 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2068 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2069 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002070 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002071 with the same value as s.
2072
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002073- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2074
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002075Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002077
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002078- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2079
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002080- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2081 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2082 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2083 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2084 objects.
2085
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002086- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2087 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002088 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2089 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2090
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002091- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2092 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2093 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2094
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002095Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002096-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002097
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002098- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2099 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2100 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2101 by the instances.
2102
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002103- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2104 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2105 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2106
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002107- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2108 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2109 before the entire comparison is complete.
2110
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002111- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2112 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2113 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2114
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002115- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2116 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2117 getwriter().
2118
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002119- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2120 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2121
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002122- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002123 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2124 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2125
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002126- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2127 iterable object.
2128
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002129- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2130 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002131
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002132- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2133 authentication.
2134
2135- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2136 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002137
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002138- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002139 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2140 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2141 a sample driver.)
2142
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002143Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002144-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002145
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002146- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2147 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2148 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2149 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2150 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2151 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2152 kernel has large file support.
2153
2154- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2155 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2156 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2157 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2158 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2159
2160- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2161 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2162 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2163
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002164C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002165-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002166
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002167- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2168 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2169
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002170New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002171-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002172
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002173- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2174 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2175
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002176Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002177-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002178
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002179- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2180 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2181 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2182 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2183 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2184
2185- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2186 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2187 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2188 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2189
2190- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2191 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2192
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002193Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002194-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002195
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002196- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002197 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2198 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002199
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002200
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002201What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2202===========================
2203
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002204*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2205
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002206Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002207----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002208
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002209- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2210 big to represent as a C double.
2211
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002212- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2213 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2214 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2215 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2216 restriction).
2217
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002218- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2219 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2220 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2221 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2222 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2223
2224 >>> dir([])
2225 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2226 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2227 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2228 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2229 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2230 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2231 'reverse', 'sort']
2232
2233 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2234
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002235- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002236 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2237 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2238 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2239 OverflowError exception.
2240
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002241- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002242 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002243 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2244 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2245 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2246 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2247 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002248 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002249 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2250 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2251
2252 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2253 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2254 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2255 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002256
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002257- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002258 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2259 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2260 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2261 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2262 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2263 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2264 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2265 once it is created.
2266
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002267- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2268 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2269 (key, value) pairs.
2270
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002271- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002272 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2273 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2274
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002275- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2276 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2277 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2278 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2279 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002280
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002281- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002282 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2283 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2284
2285 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2286
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002287- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002288 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2289
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002290Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002291-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002292
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002293- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002294 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2295 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002296
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002297- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2298 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2299 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2300 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2301 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2302 in this area anymore).
2303
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002304- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2305 threading.Timer.
2306
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002307- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2308 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2309
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002310- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002311 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2312
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002313- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002314 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2315 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2316 converted to Python longs.
2317
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002318- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002319 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2320
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002321- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2322 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2323 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2324
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002325Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002326-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002327
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002328- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2329 division operators as per PEP 238.
2330
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002331Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002332-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002333
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002334- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2335 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2336 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2337 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2338
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002339C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002340-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002341
2342- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002343
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002344- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2345 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002346 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002347
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002348 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2349 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002350 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002351 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002352
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002353- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002354 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2355 module:
2356
2357 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002358
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002359 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2360 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002361
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002362 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2363 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002364
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002365 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2366
2367 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2368
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002369- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002370 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2371 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2372 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002373
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002374New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002375-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002376
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002377- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2378 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2379 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2380 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2381 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002382
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002383Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002384-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002385
2386Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002388
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002389- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2390 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2391 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2392 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002393 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2394 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2395 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2396 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2397 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002398
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002399- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002400 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2401
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002402
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002403What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2404===========================
2405
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002406*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2407
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002408Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002409-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002410
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002411- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2412 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2413
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002414- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2415 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2416 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002417
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002418- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2419 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2420 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2421 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002422
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002423- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002425- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002426
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002427Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002428-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002429
2430- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002431 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002432 the module docstring for details.
2433
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002434Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002435-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002436
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002437- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002438 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2439 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2440 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002441
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002442- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2443 Nick Mathewson.
2444
2445Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002446----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002447
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002448- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2449 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2450 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2451 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2452 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2453 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2454 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2455 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2456
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002457- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2458 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2459 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2460 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2461
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002462- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2463 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2464 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2465 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2466 come a long way).
2467
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002468- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2469 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2470 write filters for these warnings).
2471
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002472- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2473 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2474 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2475 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2476 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2477
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002478- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2479 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2480 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2481 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2482 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2483 older distribution.
2484
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002485Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002486-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002487
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002488- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2489 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002490 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002491
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002492- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2493 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2494 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2495
2496- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2497
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002498- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2499
2500- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2501
2502- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002504- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002505
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002506- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2507
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002508New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002509-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002510
2511C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002512-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002513
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002514- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2515 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2516 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2517 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2518 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2519 against buffer overruns.
2520
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002521- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002522 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2523 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002524 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2525 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2526 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2527
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002528- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2529 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2530 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2531 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2532 deprecated.
2533
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002534Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002536
2537- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2538 relevant is found.
2539
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002540
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002541What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002542===========================
2543
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002544*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2545
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002546Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002547----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002548
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002549- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2550 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2551 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2552 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2553 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2554 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2555 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2556 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002557 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002558 repaired.
2559
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002560- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002561 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002562 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2563 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2564 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2565 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2566 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2567 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2568 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2569 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2570
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002571- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2572 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2573 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2574 leading BMO character).
2575
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002576- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2577 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2578 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2579
2580 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2581 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2582 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002583
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002584 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2585 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2586 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2587 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2588 for various simple to use conversions.
2589
2590 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2591 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002593 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2594 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2595 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2596 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2597 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2598 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2599 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2600 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2601 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2602 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2603 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2604 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2605 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2606 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2607 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002608
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002609- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2610 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2611 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002612 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002613 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002614
2615 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002616 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2617 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2618 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2619 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2620 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002621 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2622 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002623
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002624 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2625 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2626 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002627 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002628
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002629- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2630 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2631 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2632 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2633 floating arithmetic,
2634
2635 x = 9007199254740992.0
2636 print long(x)
2637
2638 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2639 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2640 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2641 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2642 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2643 functions are of good quality).
2644
2645 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2646 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2647 algorithms to break.
2648
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002649- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2650 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2651 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2652 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2653 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2654 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2655 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2656 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2657 order.
2658
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002659- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2660 operation along the most common code paths.
2661
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002662- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2663 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2664
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002665- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2666 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2667 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2668 {}.update(UserDict())
2669
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002670- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2671 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2672 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2673 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2674 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2675 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2676 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2677 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2678
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002679- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002680 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002681
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002682 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002683 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2684 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002685 join() method of strings
2686 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002687 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2688 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002689 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002690 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002691
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002692- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2693 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2694
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002695- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2696 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2697
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002698- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2699 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2700 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2701 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2702
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002703- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2704 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002705 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002706 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2707 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002708
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002709- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2710
2711
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002712Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002714
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002715- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002716 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002717 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2718 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2719
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002720- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2721 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2722
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002723- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2724 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2725 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2726 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2727
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002728- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2729 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2730 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2731
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002732- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2733
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002734- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2735
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002736- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2737 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2738 that are still imported into string.py).
2739
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002740- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2741
2742- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2743 Now it does.
2744
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002745- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2746
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002747- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2748 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2749 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2750 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2751 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002752 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2753 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002754
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002755- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2756 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2757 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2758 'help(object)'.
2759
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002760Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002761-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002762
2763- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002764 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002765 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2766 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2767
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002768- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002769 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2770 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002771
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002772C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002773-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002774
2775- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2776 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002777
2778----
2779
2780**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**