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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.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +000015- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
16 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
17 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
18 objects now (one object instead of three).
19
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +000020- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
21 Windows DLLs.
22
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +000023- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
24
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000025- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
26 a new .pyc magic.
27
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000028- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
29 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
30 be there.
31
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000032- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
33 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
34 the LC_NUMERIC category.
35
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000036- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
37 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
38 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
39
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000040- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
41
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000042- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
43 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
44 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000045
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000046- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
47 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
48
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000049- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
50
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000051- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +000052 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000053
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000054- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
55
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000056- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
57
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000058- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
59 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
60
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000061- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
62 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
63 Fixes bug #858016 .
64
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000065- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
66 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
67 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
68
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000069- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
70 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
71 improves their performance (about 35%).
72
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000073- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
74 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
75 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
76
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000077- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
78 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
79 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
80 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
81
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000082- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
83 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
84 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
85 length is not known).
86
87- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
88 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000089 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
90 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000091 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
92
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000093- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
94 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
95
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000096- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
97 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
98 keyword arguments.
99
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000100- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
101 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
102 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
103
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000104- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
105 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
106 cases.
107
108- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
109 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
110 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
111 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
112 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
113 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
114 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
115 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
116 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
117 a release build.
118
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000119- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
120 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
121
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000122- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000123 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000124
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000125- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
126 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
127 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
128 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
129 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
130 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
131 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
132 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
133 destroyed.
134
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000135- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
136 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
137 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
138 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
139 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
140 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
141 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
142 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
143
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000144- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
145 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
146 character other than a space.
147
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000148- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
149 by the function object or by the method object, the function
150 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
151 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
152 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
153 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
154 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
155 attributes with the same name.
156
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000157- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
158 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
159 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
160 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
161 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
162 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
163 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
164 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
165 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
166 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
167 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
168 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
169 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
170 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000171
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000172- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
173 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
174 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
175 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
176 This has been repaired.
177
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000178- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
179
180- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
181
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000182- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
183 over a sequence.
184
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000185- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000186 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000187
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000188- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
189
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000190- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
191 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
192 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
193 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
194 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
195 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
196 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
197 records with equal keys is unchanged).
198
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000199- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
200 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
201 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
202
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000203- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
204 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
205 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
206 freelist.
207
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000208- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
209 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
210
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000211- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
212 number.
213
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000214- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
215 a TypeError exception.
216
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000217- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
218 820195.
219
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000220- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
221 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
222 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
223
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000224- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000225 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
226 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000227
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000228- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
229 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
230 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
231
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000232- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
233 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000234 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000235
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000236- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000237 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
238 the first call.
239
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000240
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000241Extension modules
242-----------------
243
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000244- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
245 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
246
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000247- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
248 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
249 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
250 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
251 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
252 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
253 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000254
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000255- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
256
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000257- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
258
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000259- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
260 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
261
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000262- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
263 fewer false positives.
264
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000265- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
266 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
267
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000268- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000269 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
270
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000271- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000272 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000273 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
274 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
275 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000276
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000277- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
278 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
279 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
280 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
281
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000282- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
283 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
284 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
285 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
286 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
287 #897625.
288
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000289- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
290 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
291
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000292- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
293 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
294 and pops on either side of the deque.
295
296- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
297 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
298
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000299- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
300 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
301 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
302 other functions that expect a function argument.
303
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000304- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
305
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000306- os.getsid was added.
307
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000308- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
309 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
310 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
311
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000312- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
313
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000314- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
315
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000316- readline.clear_history was added.
317
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000318- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
319
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000320- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
321
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000322- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
323
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000324- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
325
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000326- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
327
328- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
329
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000330- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
331
332- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
333
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000334- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
335 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
336 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
337
338- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
339 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
340 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
341 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
342 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
343 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
344 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
345
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000346- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
347 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
348 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
349 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000350
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000351- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000352 iterators from a single iterable.
353
354- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
355 of raising a TypeError exception.
356
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000357- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
358 as parameter.
359
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000360Library
361-------
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000362
363- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
364 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
365 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000366
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000367- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
368 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
369 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000370
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000371- Added Decimal.py per PEP 327.
372
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000373- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
374 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000375
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000376- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
377 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
378
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000379- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
380
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000381- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000382 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000383
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000384- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
385 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
386
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000387- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
388
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000389- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
390 on cygwin and mingw32.
391
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000392- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
393
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000394- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
395 module.
396
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000397- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
398 installation scheme for all platforms.
399
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000400- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000401 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000402
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000403- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
404 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
405 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
406
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000407- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
408 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
409 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
410
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000411- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
412
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000413- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
414
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000415- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
416 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
417
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000418- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
419 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
420 type pattern with the same value exists.
421
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000422- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
423 when run from the command prompt).
424
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000425- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
426 not taken into consideration when caching value.
427
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000428- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
429 default sort).
430
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000431- Added global runctx function to profile module
432
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000433- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
434
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000435- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
436
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000437- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
438
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000439- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000440 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
441 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
442 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
443 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
444 accordingly.
445
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000446- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
447 decoding standards.
448
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000449- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
450 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
451 called for all requests.
452
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000453- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
454 they are passed to the compiler.
455
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000456- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
457 indent, width and depth.
458
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000459- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
460 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
461
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000462- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
463 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
464
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000465- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
466
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000467- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
468
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000469- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
470
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000471- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
472 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
473
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000474- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000475 for better performance.
476
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000477- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000478
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000479- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
480 a string).
481
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000482- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
483
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000484- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
485
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000486- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
487
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000488- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
489
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000490- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
491 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
492 list of fieldnames.
493
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000494- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
495 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
496
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000497- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
498
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000499- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
500 empty lists.
501
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000502- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
503 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
504 and shelves.
505
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000506- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
507 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
508
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000509- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000510 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
511 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000512
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000513- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
514 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000515 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000516
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000517- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000518 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
519 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
520
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000521- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
522 and removed in Py2.4.
523
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000524- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
525
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000526- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
527
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000528Tools/Demos
529-----------
530
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000531- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
532 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
533
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000534- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
535
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000536- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
537 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
538 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
539 destination in situations where both files are given.
540
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000541- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
542 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
543 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
544 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
545
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000546- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
547
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000548- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
549 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
550 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
551 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
552 now.
553
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000554- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
555 in effect
556
557- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
558 C-c C-h
559
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000560- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
561 -d option was given.
562
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000563Build
564-----
565
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000566- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
567 build under OS X.
568
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000569- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
570 --enable-profiling.
571
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000572- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
573 is configured --with-tsc.
574
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000575- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
576 on AMD64.
577
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000578- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
579 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
580
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000581- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
582 removed.
583
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000584- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
585 supported (see PEP 11).
586
587- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
588
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000589- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
590
591- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
592 (see PEP 11).
593
594- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
595 sizeof(char) must be 1.
596
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000597C API
598-----
599
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000600- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
601 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
602 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
603
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000604- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
605 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
606 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
607 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
608
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000609- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
610 generator objects.
611
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000612- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
613 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000614 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
615 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000616
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000617- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
618 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
619
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000620- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
621 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
622 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
623 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
624 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
625
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000626- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
627 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
628 about 10% faster.
629
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000630- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
631 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
632
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000633- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
634 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
635 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
636 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
637
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000638New platforms
639-------------
640
641Tests
642-----
643
644Windows
645-------
646
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000647- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
648 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
649 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
650 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
651
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000652- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
653 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
654 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
655
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000656Mac
657----
658
659
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000660What's New in Python 2.3 final?
661===============================
662
663*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
664
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000665IDLE
666----
667
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000668- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
669 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
670 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
671 context-menu actions.
672
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000673- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
674 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
675 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
676 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
677 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
678 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
679 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
680 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
681 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
682
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000683
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000684What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
685=============================================
686
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000687*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000688
689Core and builtins
690-----------------
691
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000692- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000693 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000694 comment at the end are still unsupported.
695
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000696Extension modules
697-----------------
698
699- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
700 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
701 than once. This has been fixed.
702
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000703- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
704 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
705 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
706 call.
707
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000708- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
709
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000710Library
711-------
712
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000713- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
714 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
715
716- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
717 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
718 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
719 restored.
720
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000721IDLE
722----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000723
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000724- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000725
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000726Build
727-----
728
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000729- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
730 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
731
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000732C API
733-----
734
735Windows
736-------
737
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000738- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
739 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
740
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000741- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
742
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000743Mac
744---
745
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000746- Various fixes to pimp.
747
748- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
749
750- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
751 more problems than it solves.
752
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000753
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000754What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
755=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000756
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000757*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
758
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000759Core and builtins
760-----------------
761
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000762- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
763 by sys.setcheckinterval().
764
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000765- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
766 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000767 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000768
769- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
770 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
771 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000772 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000773
774- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
775 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000776
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000777- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
778 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
779 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
780
781- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000782 770247.
783
784- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000785
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000786Extension modules
787-----------------
788
789- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
790 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
791
792- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
793
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000794- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
795
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000796- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
797 contained within the _strptime module.
798
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000799- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
800 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
801
802- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000803 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
804
805- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
806 the find_class attribute, if present.
807
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000808- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000809
810 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
811 (SF bug 763298).
812
813 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000814 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
815 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
816 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000817
818 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
819
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000820Library
821-------
822
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000823- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
824
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000825- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
826 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
827 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
828 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
829 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
830 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
831 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
832 or Tester().
833
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000834- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
835 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
836 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
837 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
838 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
839 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
840 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
841 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
842 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000843
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000844 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000845
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000846- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
847 weren't before was an oversight.
848
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000849- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
850 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
851
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000852- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
853 when there are no lines.
854
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000855- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
856 which could occur with Tk 8.4
857
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000858- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
859 to child processes.
860
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000861- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
862
863- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
864
865- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
866 xmlrpclib.
867
868- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
869 responses.
870
871- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
872 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
873
874- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
875 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
876 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
877
878- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
879 used as patterns.
880
881- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
882 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
883 than Tk 8.3.
884
885- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
886
887- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000888
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000889Tools/Demos
890-----------
891
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000892- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
893
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000894- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
895
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000896- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000897
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000898Build
899-----
900
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000901- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
902
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000903- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
904
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000905- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
906 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000907
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000908- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
909 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
910 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000911
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000912C API
913-----
914
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000915- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
916 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
917
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000918Windows
919-------
920
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000921- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
922 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
923 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
924 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
925 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
926 Python exception ::
927
928 thread.error: can't start new thread
929
930 is raised now.
931
932- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
933 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
934 instead of from DLL teardown.
935
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000936Mac
937---
938
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000939- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000940 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000941 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
942 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
943 the executable in the bundle.
944
945- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000946
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000947- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
948
949- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
950 on Panther.
951
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000952What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
953================================
954
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000955*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000956
957Core and builtins
958-----------------
959
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000960- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
961 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
962 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
963 with the -i option.
964
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000965- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
966 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
967
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000968- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
969 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
970
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000971- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
972 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
973 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
974 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
975 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
976 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
977 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
978 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
979 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
980 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
981 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
982 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
983 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000984
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000985- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
986 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
987 embedded in a lambda expression.
988
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000989- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
990 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
991 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
992 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
993 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
994
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000995- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
996 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
997 matches the restriction on classic classes.
998
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000999- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1000 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1001
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001002- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1003 It's writable again.
1004
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001005- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1006 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1007 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001008 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001009
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001010- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1011 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1012 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1013
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001014Extension modules
1015-----------------
1016
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001017- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1018 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1019
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001020- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1021 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1022 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1023 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1024
1025- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1026 collection.
1027
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001028- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1029 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1030 unique within a single program run.
1031
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001032- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1033 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1034
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001035- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1036 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1037
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001038- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1039 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001040
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001041- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1042
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001043- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1044 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1045
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001046- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1047 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1048 for many BSD-derived systems.
1049
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001050
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001051Library
1052-------
1053
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001054- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1055 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1056 primary ones:
1057
1058 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1059 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1060 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1061
1062 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1063 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1064 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1065 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1066 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1067 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1068
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001069- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1070 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1071 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1072 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1073 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1074 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1075 argument.
1076
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001077- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1078 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1079 in the archive.
1080
1081- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1082 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1083
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001084- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1085 569574).
1086
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001087- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1088 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1089 no more.
1090
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001091- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1092 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1093 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1094 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1095 code coverage.
1096
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001097- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1098 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1099 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001100 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1101 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001102
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001103- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1104 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1105 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001106 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001107
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001108- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1109
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001110- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1111 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1112 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1113 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1114
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001115- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1116 handling.
1117
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001118- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1119 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1120
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001121- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1122 in socket.py.
1123
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001124- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1125
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001126- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1127 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1128 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1129 opener with proxy support.
1130
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001131- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1132
1133- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1134
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001135Tools/Demos
1136-----------
1137
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001138- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1139
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001140- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1141
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001142- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1143 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001144
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001145- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1146 files.
1147
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001148Build
1149-----
1150
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001151- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001152 different root directory.
1153
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001154C API
1155-----
1156
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001157- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1158 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1159 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1160 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1161 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1162 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1163 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1164 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1165 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1166 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1167
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001168- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1169 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1170 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1171 from Python.
1172
1173
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001174New platforms
1175-------------
1176
1177None this time.
1178
1179Tests
1180-----
1181
1182- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1183 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1184
1185Windows
1186-------
1187
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001188- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1189
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001190- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1191 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1192 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1193 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1194 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1195 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1196 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1197 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1198 that's what it's for.
1199
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001200Mac
1201---
1202
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001203- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1204 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1205 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1206 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001207- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1208 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1209- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001210
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001211SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1212------------------------------------
1213
1214430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1215598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1216622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1217661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1218683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1219697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1220713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1221724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1222727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1223729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1224730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1225731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1226732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1227733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1228735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1229740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1230744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1231745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1232747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1233749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1234751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1235753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1236755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1237757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1238760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1239
1240
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001241What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1242================================
1243
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001244*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001245
1246Core and builtins
1247-----------------
1248
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001249- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1250 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1251
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001252- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1253 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1254 and cannot be strings).
1255
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001256- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1257 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1258 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1259 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1260
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001261- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1262 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1263 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1264 Python itself.
1265
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001266- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1267 the referenced object, if it has one.
1268
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001269- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1270 the thread started at
1271 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1272
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001273- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1274 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1275 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1276 placed on a list index.
1277
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001278- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1279 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1280 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1281 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1282
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001283- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1284 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1285 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1286 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1287 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1288 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1289 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1290
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001291- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1292 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1293 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1294 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1295 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1296
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001297- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1298 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001299
1300- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1301 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1302 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1303 #693195.)
1304
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001305- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1306 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001307
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001308- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001309 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001310 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1311 interpreter executions, would fail.
1312
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001313- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001314 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001315 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001316
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001317Extension modules
1318-----------------
1319
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001320- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1321 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1322 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1323 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1324
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001325- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1326 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1327
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001328- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1329 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1330 and Greg Chapman.)
1331
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001332- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1333 recursively.
1334
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001335- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001336 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1337 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1338 leaks.
1339
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001340- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1341
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001342- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1343 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1344 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1345 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1346 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1347 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1348 #705836.
1349
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001350- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001351 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1352
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001353- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1354 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1355 See SF bug #692416.
1356
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001357- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1358 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1359
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001360- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1361 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1362 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001363
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001364- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001365 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1366 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1367
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001368- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1369 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1370 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1371 timeouts to work properly.
1372
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001373Library
1374-------
1375
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001376- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1377 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1378 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1379 future release.
1380
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001381- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1382 for querying platform dependent features.
1383
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001384- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001385
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001386- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1387 pickle protocol versions.
1388
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001389- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1390 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1391 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1392
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001393- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1394
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001395- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1396 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1397 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1398 modules.
1399
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001400- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1401 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1402 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1403
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001404- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1405 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1406
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001407- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1408 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1409 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1410
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001411- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001412 MS Office extensions.
1413
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001414- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1415 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1416
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001417- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1418 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1419
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001420- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1421 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1422 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1423 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1424 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1425 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1426
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001427- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1428 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1429 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001430
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001431- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1432 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1433 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1434
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001435- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1436
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001437- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1438 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1439 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1440
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001441Tools/Demos
1442-----------
1443
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001444- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1445 See the module docstring for details.
1446
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001447Build
1448-----
1449
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001450- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1451 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001452
1453C API
1454-----
1455
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001456- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1457
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001458- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1459 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1460 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1461
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001462- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1463 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001464
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001465 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1466 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1467 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001468
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001469- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001470 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1471
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001472- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1473 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1474 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001475
1476New platforms
1477-------------
1478
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001479None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001480
1481Tests
1482-----
1483
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001484- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1485 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001486
1487Windows
1488-------
1489
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001490- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1491 function.
1492
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001493- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1494 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001495
1496Mac
1497---
1498
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001499- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1500 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001501
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001502- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1503 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001504
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001505- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1506 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1507 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001508
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001509- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001510 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1511 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001512
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001513- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1514 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001515
1516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001517What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1518=================================
1519
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001520*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001521
1522Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001523-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001524
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001525- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1526 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1527 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1528
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001529- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1530 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1531 (SF patch #664376.)
1532
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001533- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1534 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1535 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1536 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1537 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1538 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001539 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001540
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001541- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1542 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1543 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1544 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001545 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001546
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001547- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1548 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1549 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1550 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1551 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1552 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1553 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1554 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1555 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1556 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1557 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1558
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001559- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1560 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1561 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1562 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1563 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1564 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1565
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001566- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1567 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1568
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001569- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1570 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1571 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1572 case.)
1573
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001574- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1575 passed as unicode strings.
1576
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001577- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1578 See SF bug #683467.
1579
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001580- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1581 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1582
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001583- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1584
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001585- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1586
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001587- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1588 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1589 arguments.
1590
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001591- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1592 See SF bug #667147.
1593
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001594- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001595 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001596 See SF bug #676155.
1597
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001598- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001599 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001600 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1601 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1602 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1603 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1604 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1605 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001606
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001607Extension modules
1608-----------------
1609
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001610- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1611 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1612 tp_as_number pointer.
1613
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001614- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1615 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1616 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1617 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1618 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1619
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001620- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1621
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001622- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1623
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001624- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001625 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001626 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1627 patch #678531.)
1628
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001629- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1630 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1631
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001632- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1633 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1634
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001635- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1636
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001637- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1638 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1639 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1640
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001641- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1642
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001643- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1644 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1645
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001646- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001647
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001648- datetime changes:
1649
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001650 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1651
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001652 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1653 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1654 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1655 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1656 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1657 now.
1658
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001659 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001660 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1661 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001662
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001663 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001664 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001665 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1666 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1667 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1668 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001669
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001670 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1671 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1672 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001673 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1674
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001675 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1676 by a later example coded by Guido.
1677
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001678 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001679 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1680 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1681 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001682 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1683 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1684
1685 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1686 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1687 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1688 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1689 tzinfo subclass instance.
1690
1691 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1692 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1693 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1694 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1695 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1696 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1697 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1698 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001699
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001700 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1701 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1702 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1703 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1704 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001705 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1706
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001707 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001708
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001709 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1710 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1711 as a naive datetime object.
1712
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001713 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1714 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1715 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1716
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001717 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1718 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1719 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1720 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1721 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1722 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1723 comparison.
1724
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001725 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1726 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1727 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1728 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001729 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001730
1731 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001732
1733 and ::
1734
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001735 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1736
1737 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1738 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1739 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1740 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1741
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001742 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1743 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1744 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1745 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1746 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1747
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001748 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1749 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001750 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1751 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001752
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001753Library
1754-------
1755
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001756- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1757 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1758
1759- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1760 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1761 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1762 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1763 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1764 See PEP 307 for details.
1765
1766- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1767 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1768
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001769- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1770 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001771 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001772 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1773 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001774 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001775
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001776- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1777 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1778
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001779- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1780 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1781 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1782
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001783- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1784
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001785- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1786 exception.
1787
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001788- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1789 class.
1790
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001791- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1792 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1793 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1794
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001795- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1796 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1797
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001798- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001799 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1800 See SF bug #659228.
1801
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001802- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1803 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1804 See SF patch #651082.
1805
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001806- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001807
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001808- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1809 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1810
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001811- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001812 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001813
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001814- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1815 DOS paths from other platforms.
1816
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001817Tools/Demos
1818-----------
1819
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001820- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1821 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1822 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1823 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1824 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1825 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1826 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1827 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1828 example:
1829
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001830 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1831 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001832
1833 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1834
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001835
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001836Build
1837-----
1838
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001839- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1840 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1841 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001842 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1843
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001844 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1845
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001846- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1847 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1848 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1849 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1850 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1851 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1852 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1853 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1854 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1855
1856- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1857 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1858 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1859 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1860
1861- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1862 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1863
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001864C API
1865-----
1866
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001867- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1868 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001869
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001870- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1871 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1872 tp_as_number pointer.
1873
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001874- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1875 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1876 (SF #681367)
1877
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001878- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1879 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1880 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1881 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001882
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001883Tests
1884-----
1885
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001886- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001887 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1888 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1889 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1890 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1891 pydoc.)
1892
1893- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1894
1895- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001896
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001897Windows
1898-------
1899
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001900- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1901 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1902 time).
1903
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001904- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1905 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1906
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001907- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1908 release without strong cryptography.
1909
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001910- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001911 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001912
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001913- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1914 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1915
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001916Mac
1917---
1918
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001919- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1920 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001921
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001922- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1923 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1924 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001925
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001926- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1927 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001928
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001929- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1930 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1931 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1932 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001933
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001934- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001935 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1936 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1937 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001938
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001939
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001940What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001941=================================
1942
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001943*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001944
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001945Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001946--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001947
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001948- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1949
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001950- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1951 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001952 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001953 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001954 a different meaning than before.
1955
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001956- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001957 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001958 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001959
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001960- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001961 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001962 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001963
1964- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1965 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1966 and deallocation.
1967
1968- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1969 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1970
1971- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1972 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1973 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1974 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1975 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1976
1977- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1978 now detected by the garbage collector.
1979
1980- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1981 [SF bug 519621]
1982
1983- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1984 identifier.
1985
1986- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1987 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1988 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1989 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1990 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1991 [SF bug 563060]
1992
1993- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1994 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1995 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1996 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1997 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1998
1999- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2000 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2001 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2002
2003- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2004
2005- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2006 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2007 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2008 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2009 state of the slots would be lost.)
2010
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002011Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002013
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002014- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002015 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2016 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2017 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2018 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002019 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2020 Jython 2.1.
2021
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002022- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002023 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002024 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2025 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2026 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2027 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2028 these, see PEP 302.
2029
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002030- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2031 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2032 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2033
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002034- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2035 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2036 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2037
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002038- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2039 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2040 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2041
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002042- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2043 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2044 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2045 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2046 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2047 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2048 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2049 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2050 releases or implementations.
2051
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002052- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002053 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2054 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002055
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002056- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2057 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2058
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002059- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2060 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2061 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2062
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002063- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2064 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2065
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002066- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2067 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002068 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2069 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002070
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002071- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2072 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2073 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2074 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2075 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2076
2077 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2078 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2079 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2080 pattern.
2081
2082 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2083 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2084 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2085 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2086
2087 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2088 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2089 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2090 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2091 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2092 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2093
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002094- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2095 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2096 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2097 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2098 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2099 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2100 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2101 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002102
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002103- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2104 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2105 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2106 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2107 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002108 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2109 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2110 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2111 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2112 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2113 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2114 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002115
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002116- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2117 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2118
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002119- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2120 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2121 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2122 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2123 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2124 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2125 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2126 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2127 to Zack Weinberg!
2128
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002129- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2130 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2131 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2132 type. This has been fixed now.
2133
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002134- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2135 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2136 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2137
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002138- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2139 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2140 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2141 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2142 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2143 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2144 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2145 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002146 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002147
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002148- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2149 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2150 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002151
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002152- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2153 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2154 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2155 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2156 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2157 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2158 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2159 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002160 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002161 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2162 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2163
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002164- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2165 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2166 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2167 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2168 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2169 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2170 this.)
2171
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002172- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2173 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002174 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002175 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002176 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2177 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002178 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2179 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002180
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002181- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2182 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2183 currently running.
2184
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002185- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2186 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2187 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2188 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2189
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002190- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2191 as directory names.
2192
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002193- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2194 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2195
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002196- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2197 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2198
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002199- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002200 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2201 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002202
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002203- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2204 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2205 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2206 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2207 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2208
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002209- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2210 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2211 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2212 removed.
2213
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002214- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2215 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2216 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2217
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002218- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2219 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2220 to __debug__.
2221
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002222- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2223 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2224 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2225
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002226- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2227 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2228 deprecated now.
2229
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002230- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2231 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2232 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002233
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002234- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2235 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2236 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2237 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2238 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002239
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002240- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2241 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2242
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002243- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2244 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2245 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002246 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002247 is backward compatible.
2248
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002249- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2250 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2251 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2252 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2253 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2254
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002255- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2256 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2257 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2258 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2259 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2260 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002261
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002262- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2263 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2264
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002265- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2266 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2267
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002268- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2269 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2270 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2271 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2272 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2273
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002274- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2275 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2276 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2277
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002278- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002279 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2280
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002281- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2282 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2283 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002284
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002285- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2286 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2287
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002288- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2289 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2290 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2291
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002292- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2293
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002294Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002295-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002296
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002297- Added three operators to the operator module:
2298 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2299 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2300 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2301
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002302- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2303
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002304- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2305 archives.
2306
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002307- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2308 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2309 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2310
2311 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2312
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002313- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2314 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2315 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002316 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002317
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002318- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2319 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2320 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2321 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002322 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2323 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2324 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2325 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002326
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002327- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2328 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002329
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002330- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2331
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002332- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2333 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2334
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002335- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2336 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2337 supported.
2338
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002339- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2340
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002341- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2342 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002343
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002344- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2345 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2346
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002347- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2348
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002349- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2350 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2351
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002352- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2353 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2354 functions but callable type objects.
2355
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002356- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002357 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002358 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002359
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002360- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2361 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002362
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002363- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2364 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002365
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002366- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2367 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2368 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2369 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2370
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002371- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2372 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002373
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002374- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2375 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2376 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2377 and __imul__.
2378
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002379- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002380 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2381 is called.
2382
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002383- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2384 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2385 interpreter was compiled.
2386
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002387- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2388 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2389 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002390 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002391 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2392 1, not 2.
2393
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002394- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2395 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2396 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2397 limit.
2398
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002399- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2400 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2401 bug #623464.
2402
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002403- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2404 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2405 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2406 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2407
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002408Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002409-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002410
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002411- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2412
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002413- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2414 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2415 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2416 with Python 2.3a2.
2417
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002418- os.path exposes getctime.
2419
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002420- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002421 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002422 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002423 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002424 unit tests of floating point results.
2425
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002426- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2427 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2428 has been increased.
2429
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002430- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2431 executed.
2432
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002433- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2434 postinstallation script.
2435
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002436- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2437 test the current module.
2438
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002439- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002440 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2441 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2442 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2443 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2444
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002445- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002446 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002447 Ward's Optik package.
2448
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002449- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2450 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2451 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2452 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2453
2454- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2455 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002456 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002457
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002458- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2459 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2460 shelf are binary pickles.
2461
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002462- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2463 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2464
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002465- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2466 modules are iterators now.
2467
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002468- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2469 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2470 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2471 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2472 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2473 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002474
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002475- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2476 with their entity value.
2477
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002478- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2479
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002480- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2481 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002482
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002483- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2484 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002485 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002486
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002487- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2488 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2489 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2490 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2491 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2492 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2493 main():
2494
2495 import locale
2496 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2497
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002498- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2499 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2500
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002501- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2502 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2503 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2504 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2505 to the new standard.
2506
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002507- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2508 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2509 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2510 an extension to the database.
2511
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002512- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2513 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2514 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2515 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002516 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002517
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002518- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002519 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002520
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002521- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2522 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2523 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2524 bounded integers.
2525
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002526- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2527 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2528 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2529 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2530 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2531 in existence.
2532
2533 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2534 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2535 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2536 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2537 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2538 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2539
2540 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2541 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2542 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2543 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2544
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002545- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2546 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2547 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2548
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002549- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2550
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002551- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2552 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2553 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2554 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2555
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002556- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2557 argument.
2558
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002559- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2560 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2561 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2562 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2563 [SF patch 560794].
2564
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002565- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2566 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2567 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002568 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2569 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2570 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002571
2572- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2573 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002574
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002575- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2576 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2577 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2578 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002579
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002580- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2581 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2582 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2583 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2584 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2585
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002586- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002587
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002588- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2589
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002590- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2591 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2592 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2593 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2594 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2595 identical to None.
2596
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002597- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2598 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2599 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2600 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2601 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2602 results now.
2603
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002604- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2605 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2606
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002607- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2608 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2609 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2610 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2611 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2612 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2613 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2614 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2615
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002616- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2617
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002618- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2619 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2620
2621- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2622 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2623 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2624 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2625 and other systems.
2626
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002627- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2628 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2629 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2630 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 +00002631 work well with these.
2632
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002633- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2634
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002635- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002636 connections.
2637
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002638- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2639 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2640 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2641
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002642- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2643 sets
2644
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002645- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2646 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2647 name.
2648
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002649- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2650 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2651 passed in.
2652
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002653- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002654 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002655 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2656 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002657
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002658- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2659
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002660- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2661
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002662- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2663 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2664 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2665
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002666- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2667 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2668 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2669 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002670 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002671
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002672- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002673 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002674 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002675
2676- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2677 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2678 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2679
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002680- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002681 the value of its expression argument.
2682
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002683- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2684 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2685 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2686
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002687- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2688 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2689 skipstone browser was included.
2690
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002691- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2692 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2693
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002694Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002695-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002696
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002697- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2698 names in addition to accepting file names.
2699
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002700- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2701 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2702 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2703 still used and useful.)
2704
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002705- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2706 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2707 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2708 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002709
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002710- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2711 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2712 the generated binary.
2713
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002715-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002716
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002717- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2718
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002719- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2720 except in the hands of experts.
2721
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002722- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002723 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2724 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2725 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002726
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002727- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2728 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2729 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2730 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2731 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2732 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2733 builds.
2734
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002735- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2736 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2737 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2738 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2739 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2740 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2741 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2742 new type.
2743
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002744- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002745
2746 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2747 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2748 positive infinities.
2749
2750 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2751 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2752 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2753 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2754 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2755 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2756 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2757
2758 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2759
2760 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2761
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002762- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2763 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2764 size of the executable.
2765
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002766- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2767 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2768 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2769 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002770
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002771- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2772
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002773- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2774 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2775 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002776
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002777- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2778 well as Unix.
2779
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002780- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2781 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2782 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2783 modules in the README file for details.
2784
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002785C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002787
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002788- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2789 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002790 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002791 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002792 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002793
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002794- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2795 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2796 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2797 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2798 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2799 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002800 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002801 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2802 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2803 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2804 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2805 aligned.)
2806
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002807- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2808 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2809 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2810
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002811- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2812 level.
2813
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002814- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2815 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2816 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2817 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2818 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2819
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002820- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2821 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2822 code.
2823
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002824- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2825 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2826 adjusting for negative indices.
2827
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002828- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2829 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2830 object.
2831
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002832- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2833 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2834 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2835
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002836- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2837 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002838
2839- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2840
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002841- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2842 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2843 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2844 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2845
2846- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2847
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002848- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002849
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002850- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002851 without going through the buffer API.
2852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002853- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002854
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002855- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2856 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2857 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2858 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2859
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002860- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2861 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2862
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002863- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002864 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2865
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002866New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002868
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002869- OpenVMS is now supported.
2870
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002871- AtheOS is now supported.
2872
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002873- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2874
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002875- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2876
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002877Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002878-----
2879
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002880- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2881 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2882 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002883
2884Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002885-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002886
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002887- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2888 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2889 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2890 bugs.
2891 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002892 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002893 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2894 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002895 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002896
2897- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002898 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002899
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002900- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2901 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2902
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002903- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2904 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002905 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002906 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2907
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002908- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2909 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2910 use files" uninstall option).
2911
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002912- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2913
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002914- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2915 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2916
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002917- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2918 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2919 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2920
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002921- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2922 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2923 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2924 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2925 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002926 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2927 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2928 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002929
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002930- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002931 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002932 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2933 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2934 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2935 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2936 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2937 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2938 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2939 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2940 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2941 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2942 work around.
2943
2944- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2945 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2946 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2947 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2948 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2949 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2950 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2951 specified with O_CREAT too).
2952
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002953Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954----
2955
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002956- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002957
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002958- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2959 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2960 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2961
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002962- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2963 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2964 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2965
2966- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2967 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2968 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2969 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2970 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2971 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2972 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2973 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002974
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002975- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2976 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2977 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002978
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002979- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2980 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2981 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2982 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2983 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002984
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002985- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2986 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2987 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002988
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002989- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2990 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002991
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002992- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2993 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2994 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2995 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2996 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002997
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002998- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2999 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3000 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3001
3002- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3003 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3004 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003005
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003006- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3007 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3008 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3009 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003010 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003011
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003012- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3013 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003014
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003015- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3016 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003017
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003018- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003019 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003020 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3021 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003022
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003023
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003024What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003025===============================
3026
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3028
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003029Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003030--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003031
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003032- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3033 with a custom metaclass.
3034
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003035Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003037
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003038- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3039 are proxies.
3040
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003041Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003043
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003044- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3045 very short strings.
3046
3047- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3048 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3049 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3050 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3051 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3052
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003053Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003055
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003056- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3057 close or delete time).
3058
3059- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3060 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3061
3062- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3063
3064- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003065 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003066
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003067Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003069
3070Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003072
3073C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003074-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003075
3076New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003078
3079Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003081
3082Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003084
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003085- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3086
3087- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3088 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3089
3090- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3091 deleted at process exit time.
3092
3093- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3094 in backslash.
3095
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003096Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003098
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003099- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3100 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3101 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3102
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003103
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003104What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003105===========================
3106
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003107*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3108
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003109Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003110--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003111
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003112- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3113 been extensively updated. See
3114
3115 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3116
3117 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3118
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003119- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3120 deleted!
3121
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003122- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3123 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3124 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3125 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3126 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3127
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003128- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3129
3130 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3131 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3132
3133 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3134 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3135 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3136 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3137 supported anyway.
3138
3139 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3140 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3141
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003142- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3143 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3144 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3145 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3146 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003147
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003148- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3149 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3150 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3151
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003152Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003154
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003155- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3156 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3157 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3158 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3159 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3160 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003161 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3162 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3163 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3164 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003165
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003166- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3167 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3168 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3169
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003170Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003171-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003172
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003173- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3174
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003175Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003176-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003177
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003178- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3179 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3180 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3181 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3182 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3183 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3184
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003185- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3186
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003187- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3188
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003189- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3190
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003191- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3192 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3193 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3194
3195- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3196
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003197Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003198-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003199
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003200- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3201 off a search on Google.
3202
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003203Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003205
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003206- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3207 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3208 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3209 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3210 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3211 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3212 other platforms should do likewise.
3213
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003214- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3215 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3216 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3217
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003218C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003219-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003220
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003221- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3222 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3223 producing key-value pairs.
3224
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003225- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003226 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003227 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3228 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3229 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3230 previously went unchallenged.
3231
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003232New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003233-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003234
3235Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003237
3238Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003240
3241Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003243
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003244- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3245 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003246
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003247- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3248 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3249 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3250 home.
3251
3252
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003253What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003254===========================
3255
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003256*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3257
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003258Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003259--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003260
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003261- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3262 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003263
3264 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003265 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003266
3267 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3268 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003269 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003270 This needs to be documented.
3271
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003272- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3273 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3274
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003275- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3276 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3277 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3278
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003279- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3280 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3281
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003282- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3283 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3284 class forbids it).
3285
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003286- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3287 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3288 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3289
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003290- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3291
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003292Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003294
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003295- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3296 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003297 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003298
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003299- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3300 (like 1 + '').
3301
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003302Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003304
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003305- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3306 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3307 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3308 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003309 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003310 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3311
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003312- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3313 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3314 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3315 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3316
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003317- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3318 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003319 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3320 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3321 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003322
3323- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3324 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003325
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003326- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3327 bytes on its input.
3328
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003331
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003332- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003333 convenience function.
3334
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003335- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3336 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3337 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003338 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3339 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3340 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3341 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3342 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3343 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003344
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003345- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3346 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3347 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3348 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3349
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003350- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3351 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3352 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3353
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003354- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3355 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3356 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3357 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3358
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003359- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3360 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003362 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3363 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3364 new -l and -e options.
3365
3366- statcache is now deprecated.
3367
3368- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3369 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003370 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003371 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3372 time properly taken into account.
3373
3374- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3375 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3376 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3377 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3378
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003379Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003380-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003381
3382Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003384
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003385- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3386 is built with libdb3 if available.
3387
3388- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3389
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003390C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003391-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003392
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003393- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3394 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3395 PySequence_Size().
3396
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003397- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3398
3399- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3400 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3401 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3402
3403- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3404 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3405
3406- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3407 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3408
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003409New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003411
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003412- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3413 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3414
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003415- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3416 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3417
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003418- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3419
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003420Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003422
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003423- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3424 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3425
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003426Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003428
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003429Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003431
3432- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3433 removed completely in the next release.
3434
3435- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3436 OSX.
3437
3438- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3439 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3440
3441- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3442
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003443
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003444What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003445===========================
3446
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003447*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3448
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003449Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003451
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003452- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003453 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003454 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003455 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3456 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003457 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3458 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003459 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3460 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003461
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003462- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3463 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3464
3465- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3466 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3467
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003468Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003470
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003471- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3472 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3473 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3474 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3475 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3476 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3477 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3478 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3479
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003480- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3481 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3482 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3483 example).
3484
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003485- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003486 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003487 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003488 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003489
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003490- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3491 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3492 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003493 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003494
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003495- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3496 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3497 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3498 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3499 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3500 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3501
3502 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3503
3504 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3505
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003506Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003508
3509- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3510
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003511- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3512
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003513- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3514 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003515
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003516- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3517 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3518 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3519 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3520 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3521 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003522 attributes.
3523
3524- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3525 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3526 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003527
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003528- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3529 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3530 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003531
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003532- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3533 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3534 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003535 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3536 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3537
3538- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3539 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003540
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003541Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003543
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003544- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3545 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3546
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003547- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3548 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3549 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3550 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3551
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003552- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3553 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3554 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3555 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3556
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003557 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3558 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3559 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3560 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3561 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3562 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3563 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3564 without losing information).
3565
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003566- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003567 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3568 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3569 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3570 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3571 module).
3572
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003573 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003574 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3575 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3576 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3577 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003578
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003579- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003580 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3581 encoding.
3582
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003583- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3584 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3585
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003587 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3588
3589- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3590 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3591 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3592 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3593
3594- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3595
3596- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3597 ON, and OFF.
3598
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003599- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3600 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3601
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003602Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003603-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003604
3605- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3606 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3607 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003608
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003609- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3610 been added: -X and -E.
3611
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003612Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003614
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003615- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3616 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3617
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003618C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003619-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003620
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003621- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3622 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3623 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3624 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3625 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3626
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003627- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3628 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3629 as long) arguments.
3630
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003631- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3632 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3633 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3634 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3635 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3636 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3637
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003638- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3639 input.
3640
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003641New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003643
3644Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003646
3647Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003648-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003649
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003650- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3651 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3652 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3653
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003654- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3655 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3656 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003657 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3660 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3661 import signal
3662 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003663
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003665 while 1:
3666 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003668 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3669 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3670 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3671 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003672
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003673
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003674What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3675===========================
3676
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003677*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3678
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003679Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003681
3682- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3683 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3684 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3685
3686- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3687 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3688 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3689 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3690 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3691 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3692 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003693
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003694- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003695 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003696 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3697 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3698 associate a docstring with a property.
3699
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003700- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3701 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3702 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3703 other built-in object types.
3704
3705- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3706 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3707 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3708 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3709 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3710
3711- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3712 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3713
3714- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3715 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003716 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003717 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3718 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3719 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3720 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3721 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3722
3723- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3724 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3725 class.
3726
3727- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3728 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3729 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3730 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3731
3732- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3733 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3734 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3735 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3736
3737- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3738 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3739
3740- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3741 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3742 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3743 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3744 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003745 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003746 with the same value as s.
3747
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003748- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3749
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003750Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003752
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003753- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3754
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003755- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3756 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3757 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3758 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3759 objects.
3760
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003761- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3762 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003763 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3764 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3765
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003766- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3767 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3768 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3769
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003770Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003772
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003773- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3774 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3775 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3776 by the instances.
3777
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003778- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3779 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3780 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3781
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003782- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3783 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3784 before the entire comparison is complete.
3785
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003786- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3787 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3788 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3789
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003790- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3791 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3792 getwriter().
3793
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003794- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3795 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3796
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003797- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003798 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3799 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3800
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003801- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3802 iterable object.
3803
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003804- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3805 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003806
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003807- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3808 authentication.
3809
3810- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3811 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003812
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003813- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003814 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3815 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3816 a sample driver.)
3817
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003818Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003820
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003821- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3822 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3823 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3824 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3825 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3826 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3827 kernel has large file support.
3828
3829- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3830 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3831 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3832 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3833 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3834
3835- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3836 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3837 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3838
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003839C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003841
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003842- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3843 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3844
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003845New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003846-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003847
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003848- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3849 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3850
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003851Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003853
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003854- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3855 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3856 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3857 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3858 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3859
3860- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3861 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3862 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3863 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3864
3865- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3866 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3867
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003868Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003870
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003871- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003872 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3873 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003874
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003875
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003876What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3877===========================
3878
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3880
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003881Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003883
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003884- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3885 big to represent as a C double.
3886
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003887- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3888 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3889 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3890 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3891 restriction).
3892
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003893- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3894 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3895 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3896 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3897 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3898
3899 >>> dir([])
3900 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3901 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3902 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3903 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3904 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3905 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3906 'reverse', 'sort']
3907
3908 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3909
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003910- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003911 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3912 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3913 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3914 OverflowError exception.
3915
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003916- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003917 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003918 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3919 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3920 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3921 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3922 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003923 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3925 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3926
3927 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3928 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3929 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3930 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003931
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003932- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003933 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3934 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3935 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3936 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3937 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3938 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3939 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3940 once it is created.
3941
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003942- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3943 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3944 (key, value) pairs.
3945
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003946- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003947 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3948 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3949
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003950- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3951 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3952 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3953 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3954 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003955
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003956- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003957 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3958 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3959
3960 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3961
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003962- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003963 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3964
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003965Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003967
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003968- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003969 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3970 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003971
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003972- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3973 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3974 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3975 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3976 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3977 in this area anymore).
3978
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003979- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3980 threading.Timer.
3981
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003982- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3983 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3984
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003985- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003986 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3987
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003988- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003989 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3990 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3991 converted to Python longs.
3992
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003993- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003994 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3995
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003996- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3997 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3998 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3999
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004000Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004002
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004003- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4004 division operators as per PEP 238.
4005
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004006Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004008
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004009- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4010 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4011 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4012 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4013
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004014C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004016
4017- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004018
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004019- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4020 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004021 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004022
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4024 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004025 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004027
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004028- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004029 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4030 module:
4031
4032 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004033
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004034 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4035 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004036
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004037 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4038 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004039
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004040 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4041
4042 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4043
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004044- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004045 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4046 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4047 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004048
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004049New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004050-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004051
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004052- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4053 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4054 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4055 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4056 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004057
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004058Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004060
4061Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004063
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004064- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4065 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4066 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4067 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004068 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4069 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4070 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4071 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4072 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004073
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004074- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004075 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4076
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004077
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004078What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4079===========================
4080
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4082
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004083Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004085
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004086- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4087 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4088
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004089- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4090 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4091 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004092
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004093- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4094 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4095 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4096 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004097
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004098- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4099
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004100- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004101
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004102Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004104
4105- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004106 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004107 the module docstring for details.
4108
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004109Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004111
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004112- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004113 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4114 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4115 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004116
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004117- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4118 Nick Mathewson.
4119
4120Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004122
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004123- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4124 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4125 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4126 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4127 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4128 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4129 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4130 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4131
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004132- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4133 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4134 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4135 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4136
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004137- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4138 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4139 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4140 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4141 come a long way).
4142
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004143- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4144 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4145 write filters for these warnings).
4146
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004147- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4148 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4149 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4150 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4151 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4152
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004153- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4154 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4155 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4156 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4157 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4158 older distribution.
4159
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004160Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004162
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004163- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4164 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004165 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004166
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004167- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4168 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4169 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4170
4171- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4172
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004173- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4174
4175- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4176
4177- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4178
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004180
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004181- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4182
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004183New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004185
4186C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004188
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004189- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4190 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4191 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4192 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4193 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4194 against buffer overruns.
4195
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004196- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004197 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4198 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004199 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4200 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4201 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4202
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004203- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4204 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4205 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4206 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4207 deprecated.
4208
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004209Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004211
4212- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4213 relevant is found.
4214
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004215
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004216What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004217===========================
4218
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004219*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4220
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004221Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004223
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004224- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4225 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4226 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4227 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4228 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4229 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4230 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4231 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004232 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004233 repaired.
4234
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004235- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004236 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004237 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4238 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4239 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4240 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4241 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4242 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4243 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4244 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4245
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004246- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4247 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4248 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4249 leading BMO character).
4250
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004251- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4252 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4253 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4254
4255 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4256 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4257 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004258
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004259 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4260 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4261 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4262 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4263 for various simple to use conversions.
4264
4265 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4266 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4267
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4269 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4270 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4271 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4272 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4273 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4274 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4275 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4276 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4277 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4278 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4279 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4280 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4281 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4282 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004283
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004284- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4285 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4286 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004287 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004288 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004289
4290 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004291 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4292 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4293 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4294 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4295 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004296 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4297 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004298
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004299 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4300 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4301 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004302 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004303
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004304- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4305 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4306 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4307 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4308 floating arithmetic,
4309
4310 x = 9007199254740992.0
4311 print long(x)
4312
4313 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4314 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4315 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4316 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4317 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4318 functions are of good quality).
4319
4320 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4321 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4322 algorithms to break.
4323
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004324- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4325 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4326 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4327 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4328 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4329 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4330 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4331 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4332 order.
4333
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004334- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4335 operation along the most common code paths.
4336
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004337- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4338 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4339
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004340- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4341 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4342 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4343 {}.update(UserDict())
4344
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004345- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4346 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4347 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4348 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4349 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4350 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4351 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4352 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4353
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004354- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004355 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004357 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004358 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4359 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004360 join() method of strings
4361 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004362 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4363 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004364 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004365 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004366
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004367- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4368 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4369
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004370- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4371 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4372
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004373- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4374 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4375 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4376 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4377
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004378- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4379 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004380 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004381 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4382 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004383
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004384- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4385
4386
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004387Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004389
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004390- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004391 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004392 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4393 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4394
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004395- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4396 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4397
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004398- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4399 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4400 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4401 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4402
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004403- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4404 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4405 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4406
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004407- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4408
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004409- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4410
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004411- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4412 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4413 that are still imported into string.py).
4414
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004415- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4416
4417- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4418 Now it does.
4419
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004420- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4421
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004422- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4423 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4424 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4425 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4426 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004427 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4428 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004429
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004430- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4431 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4432 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4433 'help(object)'.
4434
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004435Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004437
4438- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004439 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004440 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4441 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4442
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004443- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004444 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4445 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004446
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004447C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004449
4450- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4451 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452
4453----
4454
4455**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**