blob: 380bf9a972d9c0e43bacdd70056e13b41d7228ba [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000020- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
21 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
22 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
23
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000024
25Library
26-------
27
Raymond Hettingerc7979f12004-12-05 11:38:18 +000028- the deprecated tzparse module was removed.
29
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +000030- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
31
Raymond Hettinger4ebe3642004-12-05 04:55:14 +000032- the depecated statcache module was removed.
33
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000034- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
35
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000036- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
37
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000038- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
39
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000040- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
41 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
42 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
43
Raymond Hettinger784ab762004-12-04 10:50:51 +000044- the deprecated whrandom module was removed. Use the random module instead.
45
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000046- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000047 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000048
49
50Build
51-----
52
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +000053- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
54 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
55 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
56 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
57 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
58 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
59 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
60 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
61
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000062
63C API
64-----
65
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000066- Removed PyRange_New().
67
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000068
69Tests
70-----
71
72
73Mac
74---
75
76
77
78Tools/Demos
79-----------
80
81
82
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000083What's New in Python 2.4 final?
84===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000085
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000086*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000087
88Core and builtins
89-----------------
90
91- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
92 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
93 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
94
95
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +000096What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
97==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000098
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +000099*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000100
101Core and builtins
102-----------------
103
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000104- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
105 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
106 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
107
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000108
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000109Library
110-------
111
112- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
113 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
114 raised is re-raised.
115
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000116- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
117 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
118
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000119- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
120 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
121 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
122 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
123 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
124 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
125 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
126 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
127 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
128 by the slice are recomputed now.
129
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000130- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000131
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000132Build
133-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000134
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000135- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
136 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
137 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000138
139C API
140-----
141
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000142- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
143
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000144
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000145What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
146================================
147
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000148*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000149
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000150License
151-------
152
153The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
154is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
155changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
156Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
157intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
158durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
159the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
160License::
161
162 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
163
164says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
165to Python 2.1.1.
166
167The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
168License Version 2.
169
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000170Core and builtins
171-----------------
172
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000173- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
174 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
175 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
176 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
177 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
178 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
179 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
180 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
181 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
182 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
183
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000184- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000185
186Extension Modules
187-----------------
188
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000189- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
190 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
191 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
192 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000193
194Library
195-------
196
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000197- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
198 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
199 returned.
200
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000201- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
202
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000203- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
204 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
205
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000206- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
207
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000208- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
209 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000210
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000211- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
212
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000213- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
214
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000215- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000216 the source code is updated and reloaded.
217
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000218Build
219-----
220
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000221- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000222
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000223What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
224================================
225
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000226*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000227
228Core and builtins
229-----------------
230
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000231- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000232 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
233
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000234- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
235 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
236 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
237 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
238
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000239- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
240 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
241
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000242- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
243 constant.
244
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000245- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
246 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
247 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
248 large), and to anomalies such as
249 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
250 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
251 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
252 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000253
254Extension modules
255-----------------
256
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000257- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
258 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000259 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
260 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
261 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000262
263Library
264-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000265
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000266- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000267 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000268 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
269 --swig-cpp.
270
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000271- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
272 it is set.
273
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000274- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000275
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000276- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
277 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
278 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
279 Closes bug #1039270.
280
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000281- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000282
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000283 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000284 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
285 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
286 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
287 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
288 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
289 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
290 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
291 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
292 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
293 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
294 + Updates to documentation.
295
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000296- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
297 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
298 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
299 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
300
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000301- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000302
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000303- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
304 applications should use the getmember function.
305
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000306- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
307
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000308- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
309 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
310 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
311 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
312 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
313 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
314 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
315 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
316 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
317
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000318- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
319 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000320 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000321
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000322- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
323 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
324 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
325 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
326 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
327 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
328 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
329 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000330
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000331- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
332 the new public features (of which there are many).
333
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000334- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000335 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
336 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
337 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
338 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000339 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000340
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000341- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
342
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000343- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
344 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
345 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
346 options.
347
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000348- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
349 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
350 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
351 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
352 conditions under which non-string values work.
353
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000354Build
355-----
356
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000357- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
358 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
359 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
360
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000361- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
362 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
363 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
364 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
365 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000366
367C API
368-----
369
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000370- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
371 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
372
373- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
374
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000375- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
376 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
377 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
378 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
379 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
380 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
381 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
382 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
383 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
384
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000385- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
386
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000387- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
388 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
389 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000390
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000391Tests
392-----
393
394- test__locale ported to unittest
395
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000396Mac
397---
398
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000399- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
400 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
401 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000402
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000403Tools/Demos
404-----------
405
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000406- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
407 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
408 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
409 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
410 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000411
412
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000413What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
414=================================
415
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000416*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000417
418Core and builtins
419-----------------
420
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000421- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000422 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
423
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000424- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
425 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
426 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
427 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
428 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
429 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
430 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
431 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000432 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
433 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
434 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
435 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
436 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000437
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000438- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
439 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
440 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
441 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
442 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
443
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000444- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
445
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000446- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
447 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
448
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000449- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
450 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
451 modified the list.
452
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000453- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
454 functions is now writable.
455
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000456- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
457 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
458 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
459 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
460
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000461- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
462 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
463 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
464 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
465 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000466
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000467- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
468 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
469
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000470Extension modules
471-----------------
472
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000473- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
474
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000475- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
476 data.
477
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000478- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
479 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
480 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
481 supposed to have been truncated away.
482
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000483- Added socket.socketpair().
484
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000485- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
486 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
487
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000488- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000489 versions of Python, have now been removed.
490
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000491Library
492-------
493
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000494- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000495 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000496
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000497- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
498 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
499
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000500- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
501 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
502
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000503- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
504
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000505- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
506 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000507
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000508- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
509 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
510
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000511- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
512
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000513- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
514
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000515- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
516
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000517- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
518 Percivall.
519
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000520- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
521 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
522
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000523- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
524 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
525 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000526 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000527
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000528- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
529 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
530 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
531 and exponent.
532
533- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
534
535- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
536 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
537 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
538
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000539- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
540 to the readline module.
541
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000542- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000543 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
544 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000545
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000546- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
547 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
548 contains symlinks.
549
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000550- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
551 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
552
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000553- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
554 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
555 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
556
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000557- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
558 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
559 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
560 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
561 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
562 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
563 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
564 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
565 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
566 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
567 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
568 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
569 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
570
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000571- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
572
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000573Tools/Demos
574-----------
575
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000576- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
577 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
578
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000579- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
580
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000581Build
582-----
583
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000584- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
585 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
586 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
587 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
588 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
589 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
590 plans to do so.
591
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000592- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
593 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
594
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000595- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
596 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
597
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000598- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
599 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
600
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000601- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
602 GNU/k*BSD systems.
603
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000604- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
605 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
606
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000607C API
608-----
609
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000610..
611
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000612Documentation
613-------------
614
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000615- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
616 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
617
618- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
619 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
620 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000621
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000622New platforms
623-------------
624
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000625- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
626
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000627Tests
628-----
629
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000630..
631
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000632Windows
633-------
634
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000635- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
636 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
637 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
638 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
639 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
640 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
641 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
642 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
643 the problem.
644
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000645Mac
646---
647
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000648..
649
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000650
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000651What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
652=================================
653
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000654*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000655
656Core and builtins
657-----------------
658
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000659- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
660 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
661 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
662 sensitive code.
663
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000664- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000665 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000666
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000667 @staticmethod
668 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000669
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000670 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000671
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000672- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
673 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
674 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
675 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
676 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
677 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
678 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
679 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
680 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
681 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
682 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
683
684 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
685 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
686 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
687 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
688 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
689 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
690 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
691
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000692- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
693 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
694
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000695- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000696 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000697
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000698- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000699 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000700 which was missing for no apparent reason.
701
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000702- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000703 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
704 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
705
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000706- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
707 types that support garbage collection.
708
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000709- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
710
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000711- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
712 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
713 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
714 Jython.
715
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000716- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
717
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000718- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
719 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
720
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000721- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
722 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
723 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000724
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000725- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
726 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
727 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
728
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000729Extension modules
730-----------------
731
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000732- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
733
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000734Library
735-------
736
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000737- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
738 TIS-620
739
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000740- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
741 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
742 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
743 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
744 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
745 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
746 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
747 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
748 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
749 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
750
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000751- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
752
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000753- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
754 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
755 same as when the argument is omitted).
756 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
757
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000758- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
759
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000760- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
761 schemes are offered.
762
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000763- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
764
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000765- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
766 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
767 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
768
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000769- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
770
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000771- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
772 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
773
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000774- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
775 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
776 when dummy_threading is being used.
777
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000778- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
779 from a tarfile.
780
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000781- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000782 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000783
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000784- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
785 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
786 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
787 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
788
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000789- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
790 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
791
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000792- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
793 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
794 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
795 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
796 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
797 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
798 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
799 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
800 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
801 by some other method in progress).
802
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000803- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
804 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
805 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000806
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000807- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
808
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000809- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
810 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
811 AM Kuchling.
812
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000813- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
814 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
815 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
816
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000817- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
818 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
819 instead of unsigned.
820
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000821- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000822 no longer part of the public API.
823
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000824- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
825 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
826 string methods of the same name).
827
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000828- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000829 SF patch 945642.
830
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000831- doctest unittest integration improvements:
832
833 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
834
835 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
836 DocTestSuites.
837
838- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
839 that provide thread-local data.
840
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000841- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
842 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
843
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000844- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
845
846- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
847 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
848 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
849
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000850- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
851
852 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
853 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
854 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000855
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000856 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
857 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
858 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
859 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
860
861 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
862 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
863
864 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
865 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
866 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
867 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
868
869 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
870 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
871 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
872 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
873 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
874
875 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
876 wrapping help output.
877
878 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
879 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
880 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000881
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000882C API
883-----
884
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000885- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
886 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
887 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
888 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
889 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
890 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
891 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
892 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
893 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
894 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
895 its visible semantics have not changed.
896
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000897- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
898 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
899
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000900Documentation
901-------------
902
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000903- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000904
905 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000906 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000907
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000908 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000909
910 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
911
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000912- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000913
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000914Tests
915-----
916
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000917- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000918 platforms that use the Makefile.
919
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000920- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
921 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
922 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
923
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000924
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000925What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
926=================================
927
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000928*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000929
930Core and builtins
931-----------------
932
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000933- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
934 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
935 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
936 objects now (one object instead of three).
937
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000938- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
939 Windows DLLs.
940
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000941- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
942 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000943
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000944- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
945 a new .pyc magic.
946
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000947- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
948 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
949 be there.
950
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000951- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
952 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
953 the LC_NUMERIC category.
954
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000955- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
956 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
957 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
958
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000959- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
960
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000961- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
962 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
963 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000964
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000965- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
966 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
967
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000968- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
969
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000970- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000971 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000972
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000973- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
974
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000975- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
976
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000977- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
978 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
979
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000980- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
981 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
982 Fixes bug #858016 .
983
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000984- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
985 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
986 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
987
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000988- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
989 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
990 improves their performance (about 35%).
991
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000992- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
993 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
994 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
995
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000996- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
997 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
998 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
999 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1000
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001001- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1002 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1003 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1004 length is not known).
1005
1006- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1007 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001008 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1009 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001010 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1011
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001012- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1013 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1014
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001015- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1016 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1017 keyword arguments.
1018
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001019- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1020 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1021 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1022
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001023- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1024 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1025 cases.
1026
1027- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1028 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1029 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1030 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1031 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1032 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1033 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1034 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1035 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1036 a release build.
1037
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001038- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1039 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1040
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001041- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001042 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001043
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001044- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1045 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1046 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1047 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1048 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1049 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1050 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1051 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1052 destroyed.
1053
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001054- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1055 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1056 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1057 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1058 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1059 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1060 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1061 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1062
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001063- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1064 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1065 character other than a space.
1066
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001067- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1068 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1069 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1070 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1071 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1072 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1073 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1074 attributes with the same name.
1075
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001076- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1077 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1078 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1079 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1080 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1081 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1082 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1083 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1084 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1085 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1086 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1087 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1088 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1089 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001090
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001091- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1092 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1093 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1094 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1095 This has been repaired.
1096
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001097- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1098
1099- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1100
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001101- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1102 over a sequence.
1103
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001104- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001105 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001106
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001107- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1108
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001109- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1110 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1111 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1112 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1113 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1114 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1115 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1116 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1117
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001118- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1119 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1120 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1121
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001122- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1123 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1124 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1125 freelist.
1126
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001127- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1128 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1129
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001130- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1131 number.
1132
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001133- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1134 a TypeError exception.
1135
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001136- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1137 820195.
1138
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001139- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1140 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1141 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1142
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001143- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001144 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1145 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001146
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001147- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1148 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1149 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1150
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001151- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1152 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001153 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001154
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001155- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001156 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1157 the first call.
1158
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001159
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001160Extension modules
1161-----------------
1162
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001163- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1164 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1165
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001166- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1167 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1168 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1169 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1170 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1171 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1172 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001173
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001174- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1175
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001176- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1177
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001178- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1179 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1180
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001181- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1182 fewer false positives.
1183
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001184- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1185 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1186
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001187- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001188 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1189
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001190- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001191 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001192 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001193 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1194 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001195
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001196- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1197 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1198 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1199 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1200
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001201- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1202 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1203 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1204 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1205 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1206 #897625.
1207
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001208- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1209 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1210
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001211- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1212 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1213 and pops on either side of the deque.
1214
1215- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1216 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1217
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001218- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1219 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1220 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1221 other functions that expect a function argument.
1222
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001223- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1224
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001225- os.getsid was added.
1226
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001227- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1228 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1229 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1230
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001231- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1232
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001233- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1234
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001235- readline.clear_history was added.
1236
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001237- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1238
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001239- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1240
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001241- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1242
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001243- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1244
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001245- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1246
1247- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1248
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001249- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1250
1251- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1252
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001253- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1254 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1255 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1256
1257- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1258 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1259 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1260 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1261 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1262 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1263 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1264
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001265- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1266 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1267 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1268 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001269
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001270- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001271 iterators from a single iterable.
1272
1273- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1274 of raising a TypeError exception.
1275
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001276- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1277 as parameter.
1278
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001279Library
1280-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001281
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001282- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1283 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1284 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001285
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001286- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1287 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1288 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001289
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001290- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001291
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001292- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1293 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001294
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001295- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1296 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1297
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001298- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1299
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001300- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001301 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001302
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001303- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001304 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001305
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001306- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1307
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001308- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1309 on cygwin and mingw32.
1310
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001311- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1312
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001313- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1314 module.
1315
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001316- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1317 installation scheme for all platforms.
1318
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001319- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001320 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001321
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001322- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1323 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1324 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1325
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001326- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1327 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1328 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1329
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001330- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1331
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001332- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1333
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001334- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1335 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1336
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001337- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1338 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1339 type pattern with the same value exists.
1340
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001341- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1342 when run from the command prompt).
1343
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001344- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1345 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1346
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001347- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1348 default sort).
1349
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001350- Added global runctx function to profile module
1351
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001352- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1353
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001354- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1355
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001356- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1357
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001358- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001359 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1360 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1361 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1362 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1363 accordingly.
1364
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001365- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1366 decoding standards.
1367
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001368- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1369 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1370 called for all requests.
1371
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001372- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1373 they are passed to the compiler.
1374
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001375- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1376 indent, width and depth.
1377
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001378- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1379 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1380
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001381- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1382 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1383
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001384- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1385
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001386- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1387
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001388- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1389
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001390- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1391 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1392
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001393- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001394 for better performance.
1395
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001396- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001397
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001398- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1399 a string).
1400
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001401- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1402
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001403- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1404
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001405- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1406
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001407- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1408
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001409- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1410 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1411 list of fieldnames.
1412
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001413- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1414 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1415
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001416- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1417
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001418- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1419 empty lists.
1420
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001421- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1422 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1423 and shelves.
1424
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001425- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1426 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1427
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001428- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001429 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1430 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001431
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001432- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1433 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001434 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001435
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001436- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001437 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1438 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1439
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001440- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1441 and removed in Py2.4.
1442
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001443- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1444
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001445- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1446
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001447Tools/Demos
1448-----------
1449
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001450- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1451 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1452
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001453- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1454
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001455- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1456 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1457 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1458 destination in situations where both files are given.
1459
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001460- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1461 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1462 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1463 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1464
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001465- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1466
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001467- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1468 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1469 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1470 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1471 now.
1472
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001473- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1474 in effect
1475
1476- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1477 C-c C-h
1478
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001479- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1480 -d option was given.
1481
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001482Build
1483-----
1484
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001485- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1486 build under OS X.
1487
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001488- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1489 --enable-profiling.
1490
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001491- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1492 is configured --with-tsc.
1493
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001494- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1495 on AMD64.
1496
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001497- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1498 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1499
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001500- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1501 removed.
1502
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001503- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1504 supported (see PEP 11).
1505
1506- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1507
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001508- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1509
1510- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1511 (see PEP 11).
1512
1513- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1514 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1515
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001516C API
1517-----
1518
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001519- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1520 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1521 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1522
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001523- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1524 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1525 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1526 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1527
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001528- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1529 generator objects.
1530
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001531- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1532 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001533 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1534 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001535
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001536- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1537 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1538
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001539- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1540 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1541 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1542 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1543 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1544
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001545- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1546 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1547 about 10% faster.
1548
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001549- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1550 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1551
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001552- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1553 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1554 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1555 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1556
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001557Windows
1558-------
1559
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001560- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1561 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1562 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1563 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1564
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001565- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1566 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1567 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1568
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001569
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001570What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1571===============================
1572
1573*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1574
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001575IDLE
1576----
1577
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001578- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1579 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1580 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1581 context-menu actions.
1582
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001583- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1584 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1585 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1586 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1587 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1588 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1589 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1590 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1591 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1592
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001593
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001594What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1595=============================================
1596
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001597*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001598
1599Core and builtins
1600-----------------
1601
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001602- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001603 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001604 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1605
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001606Extension modules
1607-----------------
1608
1609- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1610 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1611 than once. This has been fixed.
1612
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001613- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1614 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1615 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1616 call.
1617
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001618- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1619
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001620Library
1621-------
1622
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001623- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1624 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1625
1626- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1627 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1628 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1629 restored.
1630
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001631IDLE
1632----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001633
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001634- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001635
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001636Build
1637-----
1638
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001639- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1640 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1641
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001642C API
1643-----
1644
1645Windows
1646-------
1647
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001648- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1649 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1650
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001651- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1652
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001653Mac
1654---
1655
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001656- Various fixes to pimp.
1657
1658- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1659
1660- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1661 more problems than it solves.
1662
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001663
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001664What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1665=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001666
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001667*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1668
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001669Core and builtins
1670-----------------
1671
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001672- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1673 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1674
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001675- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1676 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001677 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001678
1679- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1680 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1681 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001682 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001683
1684- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1685 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001686
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001687- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1688 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1689 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1690
1691- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001692 770247.
1693
1694- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001695
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001696Extension modules
1697-----------------
1698
1699- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1700 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1701
1702- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1703
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001704- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1705
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001706- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1707 contained within the _strptime module.
1708
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001709- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1710 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1711
1712- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001713 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1714
1715- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1716 the find_class attribute, if present.
1717
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001718- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001719
1720 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1721 (SF bug 763298).
1722
1723 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001724 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1725 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1726 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001727
1728 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1729
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001730Library
1731-------
1732
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001733- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1734
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001735- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1736 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1737 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1738 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1739 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1740 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1741 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1742 or Tester().
1743
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001744- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1745 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1746 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1747 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1748 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1749 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1750 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1751 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1752 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001753
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001754 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001755
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001756- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1757 weren't before was an oversight.
1758
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001759- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1760 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1761
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001762- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1763 when there are no lines.
1764
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001765- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1766 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1767
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001768- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1769 to child processes.
1770
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001771- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1772
1773- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1774
1775- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1776 xmlrpclib.
1777
1778- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1779 responses.
1780
1781- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1782 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1783
1784- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1785 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1786 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1787
1788- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1789 used as patterns.
1790
1791- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1792 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1793 than Tk 8.3.
1794
1795- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1796
1797- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001798
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001799Tools/Demos
1800-----------
1801
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001802- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1803
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001804- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1805
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001806- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001807
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001808Build
1809-----
1810
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001811- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1812
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001813- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1814
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001815- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1816 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001817
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001818- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1819 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1820 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001821
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001822C API
1823-----
1824
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001825- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1826 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1827
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001828Windows
1829-------
1830
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001831- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1832 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1833 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1834 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1835 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1836 Python exception ::
1837
1838 thread.error: can't start new thread
1839
1840 is raised now.
1841
1842- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1843 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1844 instead of from DLL teardown.
1845
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001846Mac
1847---
1848
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001849- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001850 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001851 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1852 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1853 the executable in the bundle.
1854
1855- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001856
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001857- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1858
1859- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1860 on Panther.
1861
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001862What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1863================================
1864
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001865*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001866
1867Core and builtins
1868-----------------
1869
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001870- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1871 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1872 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1873 with the -i option.
1874
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001875- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1876 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1877
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001878- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1879 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1880
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001881- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1882 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1883 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1884 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1885 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1886 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1887 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1888 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1889 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1890 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1891 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1892 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1893 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001894
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001895- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1896 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1897 embedded in a lambda expression.
1898
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001899- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1900 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1901 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1902 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1903 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1904
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001905- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1906 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1907 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1908
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001909- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1910 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1911
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001912- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1913 It's writable again.
1914
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001915- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1916 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1917 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001918 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001919
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001920- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1921 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1922 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1923
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001924Extension modules
1925-----------------
1926
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001927- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1928 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1929
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001930- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1931 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1932 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1933 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1934
1935- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1936 collection.
1937
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001938- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1939 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1940 unique within a single program run.
1941
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001942- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1943 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1944
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001945- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1946 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1947
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001948- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1949 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001950
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001951- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1952
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001953- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1954 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1955
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001956- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1957 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1958 for many BSD-derived systems.
1959
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001960
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001961Library
1962-------
1963
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001964- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1965 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1966 primary ones:
1967
1968 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1969 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1970 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1971
1972 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1973 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1974 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1975 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1976 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1977 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1978
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001979- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1980 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1981 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1982 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1983 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1984 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1985 argument.
1986
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001987- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1988 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1989 in the archive.
1990
1991- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1992 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1993
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001994- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1995 569574).
1996
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001997- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1998 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1999 no more.
2000
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002001- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2002 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2003 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2004 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2005 code coverage.
2006
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002007- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2008 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2009 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002010 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2011 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002012
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002013- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2014 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2015 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002016 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002017
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002018- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2019
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002020- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2021 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2022 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2023 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2024
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002025- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2026 handling.
2027
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002028- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2029 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2030
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002031- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2032 in socket.py.
2033
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002034- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2035
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002036- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2037 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2038 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2039 opener with proxy support.
2040
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002041- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2042
2043- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2044
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002045Tools/Demos
2046-----------
2047
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002048- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2049
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002050- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2051
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002052- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2053 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002054
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002055- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2056 files.
2057
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002058Build
2059-----
2060
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002061- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002062 different root directory.
2063
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002064C API
2065-----
2066
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002067- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2068 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2069 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2070 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2071 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2072 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2073 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2074 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2075 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2076 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2077
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002078- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2079 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2080 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2081 from Python.
2082
2083
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002084New platforms
2085-------------
2086
2087None this time.
2088
2089Tests
2090-----
2091
2092- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2093 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2094
2095Windows
2096-------
2097
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002098- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2099
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002100- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2101 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2102 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2103 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2104 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2105 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2106 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2107 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2108 that's what it's for.
2109
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002110Mac
2111---
2112
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002113- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2114 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2115 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2116 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002117- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2118 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2119- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002120
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002121SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2122------------------------------------
2123
2124430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2125598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2126622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2127661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2128683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2129697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2130713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2131724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2132727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2133729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2134730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2135731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2136732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2137733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2138735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2139740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2140744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2141745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2142747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2143749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2144751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2145753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2146755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2147757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2148760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2149
2150
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002151What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2152================================
2153
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002154*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002155
2156Core and builtins
2157-----------------
2158
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002159- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2160 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2161
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002162- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2163 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2164 and cannot be strings).
2165
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002166- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2167 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2168 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2169 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2170
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002171- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2172 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2173 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2174 Python itself.
2175
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002176- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2177 the referenced object, if it has one.
2178
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002179- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2180 the thread started at
2181 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2182
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002183- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2184 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2185 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2186 placed on a list index.
2187
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002188- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2189 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2190 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2191 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2192
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002193- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2194 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2195 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2196 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2197 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2198 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2199 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2200
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002201- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2202 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2203 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2204 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2205 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2206
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002207- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2208 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002209
2210- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2211 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2212 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2213 #693195.)
2214
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002215- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2216 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002217
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002218- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002219 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002220 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2221 interpreter executions, would fail.
2222
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002223- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002224 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002225 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002226
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002227Extension modules
2228-----------------
2229
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002230- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2231 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2232 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2233 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2234
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002235- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2236 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2237
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002238- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2239 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2240 and Greg Chapman.)
2241
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002242- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2243 recursively.
2244
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002245- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002246 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2247 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2248 leaks.
2249
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002250- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2251
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002252- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2253 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2254 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2255 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2256 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2257 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2258 #705836.
2259
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002260- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002261 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2262
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002263- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2264 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2265 See SF bug #692416.
2266
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002267- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2268 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2269
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002270- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2271 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2272 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002273
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002274- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002275 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2276 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2277
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002278- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2279 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2280 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2281 timeouts to work properly.
2282
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002283Library
2284-------
2285
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002286- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2287 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2288 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2289 future release.
2290
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002291- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2292 for querying platform dependent features.
2293
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002294- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002295
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002296- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2297 pickle protocol versions.
2298
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002299- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2300 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2301 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2302
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002303- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2304
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002305- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2306 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2307 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2308 modules.
2309
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002310- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2311 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2312 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2313
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002314- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2315 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2316
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002317- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2318 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2319 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2320
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002321- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002322 MS Office extensions.
2323
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002324- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2325 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2326
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002327- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2328 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2329
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002330- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2331 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2332 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2333 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2334 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2335 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2336
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002337- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2338 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2339 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002340
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002341- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2342 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2343 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2344
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002345- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2346
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002347- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2348 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2349 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2350
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002351Tools/Demos
2352-----------
2353
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002354- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2355 See the module docstring for details.
2356
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002357Build
2358-----
2359
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002360- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2361 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002362
2363C API
2364-----
2365
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002366- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2367
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002368- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2369 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2370 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2371
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002372- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2373 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002374
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002375 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2376 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2377 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002378
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002379- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002380 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2381
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002382- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2383 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2384 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002385
2386New platforms
2387-------------
2388
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002389None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002390
2391Tests
2392-----
2393
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002394- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2395 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002396
2397Windows
2398-------
2399
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002400- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2401 function.
2402
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002403- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2404 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002405
2406Mac
2407---
2408
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002409- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2410 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002411
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002412- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2413 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002414
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002415- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2416 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2417 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002418
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002419- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002420 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2421 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002422
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002423- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2424 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002425
2426
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002427What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2428=================================
2429
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002430*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002431
2432Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002433-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002434
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002435- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2436 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2437 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2438
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002439- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2440 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2441 (SF patch #664376.)
2442
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002443- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2444 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2445 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2446 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2447 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2448 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002449 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002450
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002451- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2452 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2453 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2454 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002455 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002456
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002457- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2458 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2459 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2460 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2461 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2462 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2463 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2464 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2465 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2466 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2467 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2468
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002469- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2470 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2471 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2472 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2473 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2474 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2475
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002476- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2477 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2478
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002479- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2480 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2481 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2482 case.)
2483
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002484- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2485 passed as unicode strings.
2486
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002487- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2488 See SF bug #683467.
2489
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002490- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2491 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2492
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002493- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2494
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002495- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2496
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002497- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2498 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2499 arguments.
2500
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002501- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2502 See SF bug #667147.
2503
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002504- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002505 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002506 See SF bug #676155.
2507
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002508- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002509 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002510 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2511 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2512 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2513 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2514 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2515 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002517Extension modules
2518-----------------
2519
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002520- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2521 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2522 tp_as_number pointer.
2523
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002524- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2525 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2526 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2527 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2528 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2529
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002530- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2531
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002532- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2533
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002534- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002535 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002536 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2537 patch #678531.)
2538
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002539- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2540 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2541
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002542- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2543 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2544
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002545- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2546
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002547- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2548 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2549 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2550
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002551- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2552
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002553- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2554 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2555
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002556- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002557
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002558- datetime changes:
2559
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002560 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2561
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002562 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2563 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2564 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2565 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2566 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2567 now.
2568
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002569 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002570 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2571 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002572
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002573 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002574 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002575 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2576 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2577 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2578 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002579
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002580 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2581 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2582 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002583 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2584
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002585 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2586 by a later example coded by Guido.
2587
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002588 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002589 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2590 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2591 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002592 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2593 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2594
2595 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2596 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2597 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2598 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2599 tzinfo subclass instance.
2600
2601 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2602 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2603 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2604 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2605 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2606 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2607 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2608 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002609
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002610 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2611 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2612 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2613 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2614 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002615 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2616
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002617 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002618
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002619 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2620 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2621 as a naive datetime object.
2622
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002623 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2624 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2625 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2626
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002627 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2628 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2629 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2630 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2631 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2632 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2633 comparison.
2634
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002635 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2636 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2637 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2638 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002639 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002640
2641 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002642
2643 and ::
2644
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002645 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2646
2647 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2648 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2649 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2650 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2651
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002652 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2653 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2654 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2655 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2656 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2657
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002658 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2659 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002660 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2661 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002662
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002663Library
2664-------
2665
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002666- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2667 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2668
2669- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2670 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2671 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2672 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2673 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2674 See PEP 307 for details.
2675
2676- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2677 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2678
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002679- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2680 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002681 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002682 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2683 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002684 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002685
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002686- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2687 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2688
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002689- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2690 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2691 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2692
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002693- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2694
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002695- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2696 exception.
2697
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002698- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2699 class.
2700
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002701- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2702 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2703 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2704
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002705- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2706 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2707
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002708- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002709 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2710 See SF bug #659228.
2711
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002712- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2713 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2714 See SF patch #651082.
2715
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002716- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002717
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002718- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2719 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2720
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002721- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002722 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002723
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002724- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2725 DOS paths from other platforms.
2726
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002727Tools/Demos
2728-----------
2729
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002730- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2731 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2732 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2733 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2734 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2735 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2736 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2737 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2738 example:
2739
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002740 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2741 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002742
2743 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2744
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002745
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002746Build
2747-----
2748
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002749- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2750 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2751 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002752 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2753
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002754 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2755
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002756- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2757 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2758 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2759 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2760 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2761 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2762 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2763 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2764 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2765
2766- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2767 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2768 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2769 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2770
2771- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2772 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2773
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002774C API
2775-----
2776
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002777- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2778 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002779
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002780- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2781 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2782 tp_as_number pointer.
2783
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002784- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2785 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2786 (SF #681367)
2787
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002788- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2789 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2790 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2791 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002792
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002793Tests
2794-----
2795
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002796- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002797 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2798 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2799 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2800 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2801 pydoc.)
2802
2803- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2804
2805- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002807Windows
2808-------
2809
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002810- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2811 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2812 time).
2813
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002814- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2815 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2816
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002817- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2818 release without strong cryptography.
2819
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002820- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002821 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002822
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002823- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2824 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2825
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002826Mac
2827---
2828
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002829- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2830 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002831
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002832- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2833 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2834 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002835
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002836- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2837 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002838
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002839- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2840 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2841 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2842 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002843
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002844- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002845 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2846 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2847 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002848
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002849
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002850What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002851=================================
2852
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002853*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002854
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002855Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002857
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002858- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2859
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002860- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2861 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002862 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002863 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002864 a different meaning than before.
2865
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002866- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002867 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002868 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002869
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002870- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002871 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002872 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002873
2874- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2875 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2876 and deallocation.
2877
2878- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2879 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2880
2881- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2882 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2883 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2884 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2885 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2886
2887- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2888 now detected by the garbage collector.
2889
2890- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2891 [SF bug 519621]
2892
2893- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2894 identifier.
2895
2896- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2897 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2898 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2899 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2900 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2901 [SF bug 563060]
2902
2903- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2904 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2905 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2906 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2907 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2908
2909- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2910 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2911 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2912
2913- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2914
2915- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2916 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2917 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2918 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2919 state of the slots would be lost.)
2920
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002921Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002922-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002923
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002924- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002925 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2926 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2927 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2928 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002929 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2930 Jython 2.1.
2931
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002932- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002933 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002934 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2935 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2936 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2937 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2938 these, see PEP 302.
2939
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002940- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2941 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2942 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2943
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002944- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2945 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2946 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2947
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002948- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2949 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2950 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2951
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002952- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2953 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2954 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2955 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2956 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2957 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2958 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2959 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2960 releases or implementations.
2961
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002962- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002963 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2964 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002965
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002966- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2967 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2968
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002969- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2970 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2971 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2972
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002973- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2974 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2975
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002976- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2977 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002978 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2979 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002980
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002981- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2982 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2983 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2984 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2985 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2986
2987 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2988 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2989 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2990 pattern.
2991
2992 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2993 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2994 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2995 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2996
2997 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2998 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2999 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3000 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3001 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3002 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3003
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003004- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3005 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3006 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3007 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3008 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3009 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3010 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3011 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003012
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003013- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3014 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3015 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3016 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3017 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003018 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3019 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3020 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3021 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3022 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3023 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3024 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003025
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003026- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3027 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3028
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003029- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3030 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3031 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3032 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3033 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3034 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3035 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3036 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3037 to Zack Weinberg!
3038
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003039- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3040 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3041 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3042 type. This has been fixed now.
3043
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003044- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3045 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3046 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3047
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003048- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3049 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3050 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3051 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3052 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3053 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3054 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3055 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003056 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003057
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003058- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3059 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3060 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003061
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003062- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3063 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3064 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3065 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3066 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3067 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3068 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3069 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003070 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003071 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3072 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3073
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003074- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3075 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3076 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3077 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3078 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3079 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3080 this.)
3081
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003082- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3083 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003084 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003085 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003086 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3087 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003088 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3089 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003090
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003091- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3092 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3093 currently running.
3094
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003095- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3096 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3097 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3098 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3099
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003100- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3101 as directory names.
3102
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003103- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3104 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3105
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003106- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3107 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3108
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003109- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003110 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3111 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003112
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003113- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3114 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3115 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3116 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3117 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3118
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003119- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3120 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3121 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3122 removed.
3123
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003124- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3125 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3126 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3127
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003128- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3129 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3130 to __debug__.
3131
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003132- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3133 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3134 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3135
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003136- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3137 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3138 deprecated now.
3139
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003140- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3141 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3142 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003143
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003144- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3145 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3146 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3147 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3148 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003149
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003150- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3151 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3152
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003153- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3154 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3155 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003156 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003157 is backward compatible.
3158
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003159- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3160 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3161 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3162 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3163 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3164
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003165- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3166 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3167 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3168 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3169 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3170 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003171
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003172- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3173 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3174
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003175- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3176 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3177
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003178- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3179 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3180 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3181 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3182 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3183
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003184- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3185 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3186 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3187
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003188- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003189 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3190
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003191- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3192 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3193 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003194
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003195- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3196 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3197
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003198- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3199 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3200 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3201
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003202- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3203
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003204Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003206
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003207- Added three operators to the operator module:
3208 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3209 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3210 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3211
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003212- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3213
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003214- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3215 archives.
3216
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003217- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3218 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3219 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3220
3221 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3222
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003223- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3224 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3225 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003226 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003227
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003228- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3229 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3230 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3231 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003232 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3233 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3234 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3235 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003236
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003237- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3238 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003239
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003240- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3241
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003242- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3243 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3244
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003245- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3246 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3247 supported.
3248
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003249- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3250
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003251- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3252 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003253
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003254- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3255 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3256
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003257- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3258
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003259- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3260 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3261
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003262- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3263 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3264 functions but callable type objects.
3265
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003266- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003267 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003268 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003269
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003270- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3271 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003272
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003273- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3274 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003275
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003276- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3277 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3278 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3279 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3280
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003281- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3282 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003283
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003284- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3285 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3286 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3287 and __imul__.
3288
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003289- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003290 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3291 is called.
3292
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003293- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3294 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3295 interpreter was compiled.
3296
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003297- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3298 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3299 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003300 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003301 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3302 1, not 2.
3303
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003304- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3305 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3306 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3307 limit.
3308
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003309- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3310 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3311 bug #623464.
3312
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003313- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3314 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3315 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3316 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3317
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003318Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003320
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003321- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3322
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003323- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3324 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3325 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3326 with Python 2.3a2.
3327
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003328- os.path exposes getctime.
3329
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003330- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003331 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003332 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003333 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003334 unit tests of floating point results.
3335
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003336- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3337 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3338 has been increased.
3339
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003340- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3341 executed.
3342
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003343- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3344 postinstallation script.
3345
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003346- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3347 test the current module.
3348
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003349- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003350 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3351 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3352 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3353 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3354
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003355- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003356 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003357 Ward's Optik package.
3358
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003359- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3360 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3361 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3362 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3363
3364- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3365 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003366 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003367
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003368- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3369 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3370 shelf are binary pickles.
3371
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003372- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3373 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3374
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003375- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3376 modules are iterators now.
3377
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003378- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3379 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3380 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3381 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3382 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3383 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003384
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003385- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3386 with their entity value.
3387
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003388- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3389
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003390- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3391 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003392
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003393- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3394 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003395 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003396
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003397- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3398 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3399 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3400 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3401 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3402 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3403 main():
3404
3405 import locale
3406 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3407
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003408- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3409 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3410
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003411- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3412 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3413 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3414 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3415 to the new standard.
3416
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003417- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3418 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3419 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3420 an extension to the database.
3421
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003422- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3423 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3424 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3425 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003426 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003427
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003428- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003429 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003430
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003431- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3432 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3433 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3434 bounded integers.
3435
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003436- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3437 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3438 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3439 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3440 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3441 in existence.
3442
3443 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3444 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3445 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3446 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3447 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3448 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3449
3450 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3451 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3452 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3453 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3454
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003455- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3456 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3457 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3458
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003459- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3460
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003461- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3462 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3463 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3464 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3465
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003466- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3467 argument.
3468
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003469- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3470 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3471 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3472 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3473 [SF patch 560794].
3474
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003475- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3476 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3477 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003478 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3479 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3480 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003481
3482- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3483 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003484
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003485- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3486 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3487 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3488 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003489
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003490- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3491 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3492 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3493 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3494 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3495
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003496- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003497
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003498- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3499
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003500- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3501 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3502 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3503 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3504 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3505 identical to None.
3506
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003507- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3508 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3509 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3510 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3511 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3512 results now.
3513
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003514- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3515 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3516
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003517- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3518 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3519 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3520 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3521 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3522 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3523 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3524 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3525
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003526- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3527
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003528- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3529 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3530
3531- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3532 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3533 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3534 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3535 and other systems.
3536
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003537- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3538 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3539 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3540 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 +00003541 work well with these.
3542
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003543- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3544
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003545- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003546 connections.
3547
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003548- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3549 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3550 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3551
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003552- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3553 sets
3554
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003555- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3556 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3557 name.
3558
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003559- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3560 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3561 passed in.
3562
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003563- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003564 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003565 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3566 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003567
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003568- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3569
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003570- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3571
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003572- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3573 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3574 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3575
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003576- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3577 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3578 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3579 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003580 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003581
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003582- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003583 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003584 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003585
3586- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3587 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3588 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3589
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003590- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003591 the value of its expression argument.
3592
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003593- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3594 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3595 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3596
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003597- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3598 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3599 skipstone browser was included.
3600
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003601- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3602 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3603
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003604Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003606
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003607- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3608 names in addition to accepting file names.
3609
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003610- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3611 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3612 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3613 still used and useful.)
3614
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003615- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3616 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3617 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3618 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003619
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003620- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3621 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3622 the generated binary.
3623
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003624Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003626
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003627- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3628
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003629- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3630 except in the hands of experts.
3631
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003632- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003633 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3634 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3635 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003636
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003637- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3638 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3639 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3640 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3641 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3642 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3643 builds.
3644
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003645- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3646 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3647 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3648 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3649 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3650 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3651 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3652 new type.
3653
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003654- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003655
3656 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3657 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3658 positive infinities.
3659
3660 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3661 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3662 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3663 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3664 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3665 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3666 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3667
3668 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3669
3670 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3671
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003672- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3673 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3674 size of the executable.
3675
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003676- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3677 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3678 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3679 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003680
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003681- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3682
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003683- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3684 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3685 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003686
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003687- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3688 well as Unix.
3689
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003690- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3691 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3692 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3693 modules in the README file for details.
3694
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003695C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003697
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003698- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3699 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003700 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003701 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003702 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003703
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003704- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3705 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3706 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3707 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3708 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3709 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003710 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003711 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3712 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3713 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3714 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3715 aligned.)
3716
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003717- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3718 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3719 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3720
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003721- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3722 level.
3723
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003724- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3725 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3726 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3727 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3728 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3729
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003730- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3731 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3732 code.
3733
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003734- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3735 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3736 adjusting for negative indices.
3737
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003738- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3739 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3740 object.
3741
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003742- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3743 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3744 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3745
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003746- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3747 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003748
3749- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3750
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003751- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3752 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3753 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3754 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3755
3756- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3757
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003758- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003759
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003760- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003761 without going through the buffer API.
3762
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003764
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003765- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3766 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3767 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3768 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3769
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003770- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3771 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3772
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003773- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003774 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3775
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003776New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003778
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003779- OpenVMS is now supported.
3780
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003781- AtheOS is now supported.
3782
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003783- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3784
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003785- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3786
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-----
3789
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003790- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3791 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3792 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003793
3794Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003796
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003797- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3798 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3799 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3800 bugs.
3801 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003802 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003803 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3804 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003805 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003806
3807- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003808 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003809
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003810- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3811 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3812
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003813- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3814 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003815 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003816 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3817
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003818- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3819 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3820 use files" uninstall option).
3821
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003822- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3823
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003824- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3825 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3826
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003827- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3828 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3829 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3830
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003831- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3832 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3833 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3834 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3835 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003836 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3837 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3838 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003839
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003840- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003841 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003842 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3843 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3844 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3845 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3846 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3847 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3848 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3849 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3850 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3851 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3852 work around.
3853
3854- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3855 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3856 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3857 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3858 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3859 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3860 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3861 specified with O_CREAT too).
3862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003863Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864----
3865
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003866- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003867
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003868- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3869 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3870 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3871
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003872- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3873 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3874 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3875
3876- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3877 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3878 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3879 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3880 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3881 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3882 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3883 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003884
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003885- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3886 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3887 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003889- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3890 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3891 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3892 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3893 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003894
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003895- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3896 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3897 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003899- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3900 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003901
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003902- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3903 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3904 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3905 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3906 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003907
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003908- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3909 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3910 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3911
3912- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3913 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3914 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003916- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3917 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3918 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3919 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003920 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003922- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3923 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003924
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003925- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3926 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003927
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003928- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003929 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003930 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3931 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003932
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003933
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003934What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003935===============================
3936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3938
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003939Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003941
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003942- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3943 with a custom metaclass.
3944
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003945Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003947
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003948- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3949 are proxies.
3950
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003951Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003953
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003954- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3955 very short strings.
3956
3957- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3958 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3959 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3960 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3961 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3962
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003963Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003965
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003966- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3967 close or delete time).
3968
3969- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3970 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3971
3972- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3973
3974- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003975 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003976
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003977Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003979
3980Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003982
3983C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003985
3986New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003988
3989Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003991
3992Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003994
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003995- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3996
3997- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3998 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3999
4000- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4001 deleted at process exit time.
4002
4003- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4004 in backslash.
4005
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004006Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004008
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004009- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4010 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4011 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4012
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004013
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004014What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004015===========================
4016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4018
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004019Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004021
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004022- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4023 been extensively updated. See
4024
4025 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4026
4027 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4028
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004029- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4030 deleted!
4031
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004032- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4033 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4034 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4035 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4036 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4037
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004038- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4039
4040 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4041 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4042
4043 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4044 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4045 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4046 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4047 supported anyway.
4048
4049 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4050 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4051
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004052- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4053 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4054 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4055 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4056 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004057
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004058- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4059 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4060 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4061
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004062Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004064
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004065- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4066 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4067 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4068 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4069 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4070 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004071 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4072 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4073 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4074 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004075
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004076- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4077 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4078 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4079
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004080Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004082
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004083- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4084
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004085Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004087
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004088- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4089 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4090 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4091 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4092 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4093 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4094
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004095- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4096
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004097- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4098
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004099- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4100
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004101- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4102 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4103 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4104
4105- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4106
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004107Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004109
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004110- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4111 off a search on Google.
4112
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004113Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004115
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004116- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4117 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4118 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4119 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4120 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4121 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4122 other platforms should do likewise.
4123
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004124- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4125 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4126 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4127
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004128C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004130
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004131- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4132 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4133 producing key-value pairs.
4134
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004135- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004136 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004137 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4138 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4139 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4140 previously went unchallenged.
4141
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004142New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004144
4145Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004147
4148Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004150
4151Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004153
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004154- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4155 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004156
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004157- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4158 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4159 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4160 home.
4161
4162
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004163What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004164===========================
4165
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4167
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004168Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004170
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004171- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4172 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004173
4174 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004175 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004176
4177 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4178 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004179 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004180 This needs to be documented.
4181
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004182- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4183 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4184
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004185- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4186 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4187 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4188
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004189- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4190 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4191
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004192- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4193 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4194 class forbids it).
4195
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004196- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4197 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4198 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4199
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004200- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4201
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004202Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004204
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004205- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4206 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004207 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004208
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004209- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4210 (like 1 + '').
4211
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004212Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004214
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004215- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4216 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4217 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4218 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004219 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004220 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4221
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004222- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4223 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4224 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4225 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4226
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004227- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4228 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004229 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4230 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4231 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004232
4233- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4234 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004235
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004236- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4237 bytes on its input.
4238
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004239Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004241
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004242- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004243 convenience function.
4244
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004245- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4246 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4247 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004248 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4249 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4250 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4251 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4252 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4253 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004254
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004255- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4256 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4257 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4258 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4259
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004260- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4261 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4262 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4263
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004264- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4265 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4266 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4267 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4268
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004269- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4270 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004272 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4273 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4274 new -l and -e options.
4275
4276- statcache is now deprecated.
4277
4278- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4279 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004280 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004281 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4282 time properly taken into account.
4283
4284- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4285 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4286 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4287 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4288
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004289Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004291
4292Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004294
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004295- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4296 is built with libdb3 if available.
4297
4298- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004300C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004303- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4304 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4305 PySequence_Size().
4306
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004307- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4308
4309- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4310 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4311 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4312
4313- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4314 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4315
4316- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4317 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4318
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004319New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004321
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004322- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4323 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4324
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004325- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4326 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4327
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004328- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4329
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004330Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004332
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004333- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4334 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004336Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004338
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004339Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004341
4342- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4343 removed completely in the next release.
4344
4345- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4346 OSX.
4347
4348- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4349 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4350
4351- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4352
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004353
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004354What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004355===========================
4356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4358
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004359Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004360--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004361
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004362- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004363 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004364 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004365 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4366 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004367 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4368 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004369 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4370 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004371
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004372- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4373 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4374
4375- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4376 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4377
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004378Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004380
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004381- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4382 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4383 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4384 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4385 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4386 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4387 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4388 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4389
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004390- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4391 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4392 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4393 example).
4394
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004395- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004396 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004397 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004398 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004399
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004400- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4401 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4402 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004403 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004404
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004405- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4406 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4407 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4408 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4409 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4410 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4411
4412 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4413
4414 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4415
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004416Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004418
4419- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4420
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004421- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4422
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004423- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4424 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004425
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004426- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4427 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4428 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4429 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4430 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4431 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004432 attributes.
4433
4434- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4435 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4436 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004437
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004438- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4439 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4440 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004441
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004442- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4443 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4444 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004445 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4446 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4447
4448- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4449 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004450
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004451Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004453
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004454- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4455 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4456
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004457- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4458 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4459 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4460 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4461
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004462- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4463 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4464 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4465 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4466
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004467 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4468 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4469 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4470 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4471 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4472 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4473 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4474 without losing information).
4475
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004476- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004477 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4478 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4479 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4480 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4481 module).
4482
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004483 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004484 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4485 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4486 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4487 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004488
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004489- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004490 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4491 encoding.
4492
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004493- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4494 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4495
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004497 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4498
4499- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4500 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4501 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4502 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4503
4504- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4505
4506- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4507 ON, and OFF.
4508
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004509- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4510 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4511
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004512Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004514
4515- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4516 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4517 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004518
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004519- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4520 been added: -X and -E.
4521
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004522Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004524
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004525- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4526 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4527
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004528C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004530
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004531- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4532 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4533 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4534 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4535 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4536
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004537- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4538 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4539 as long) arguments.
4540
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004541- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4542 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4543 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4544 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4545 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4546 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4547
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004548- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4549 input.
4550
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004551New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004553
4554Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004556
4557Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004559
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004560- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4561 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4562 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4563
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004564- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4565 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4566 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004567 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004568
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4570 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4571 import signal
4572 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004573
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004575 while 1:
4576 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004578 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4579 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4580 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4581 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004582
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004583
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004584What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4585===========================
4586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004587*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4588
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004589Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004591
4592- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4593 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4594 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4595
4596- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4597 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4598 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4599 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4600 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4601 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4602 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004603
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004604- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004605 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004606 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4607 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4608 associate a docstring with a property.
4609
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004610- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4611 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4612 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4613 other built-in object types.
4614
4615- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4616 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4617 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4618 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4619 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4620
4621- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4622 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4623
4624- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4625 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004626 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004627 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4628 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4629 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4630 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4631 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4632
4633- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4634 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4635 class.
4636
4637- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4638 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4639 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4640 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4641
4642- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4643 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4644 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4645 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4646
4647- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4648 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4649
4650- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4651 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4652 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4653 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4654 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004655 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004656 with the same value as s.
4657
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004658- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4659
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004660Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004662
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004663- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4664
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004665- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4666 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4667 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4668 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4669 objects.
4670
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004671- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4672 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004673 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4674 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4675
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004676- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4677 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4678 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4679
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004680Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004681-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004682
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004683- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4684 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4685 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4686 by the instances.
4687
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004688- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4689 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4690 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4691
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004692- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4693 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4694 before the entire comparison is complete.
4695
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004696- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4697 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4698 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4699
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004700- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4701 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4702 getwriter().
4703
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004704- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4705 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4706
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004707- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004708 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4709 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4710
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004711- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4712 iterable object.
4713
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004714- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4715 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004716
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004717- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4718 authentication.
4719
4720- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4721 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004722
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004723- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004724 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4725 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4726 a sample driver.)
4727
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004728Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004730
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004731- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4732 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4733 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4734 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4735 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4736 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4737 kernel has large file support.
4738
4739- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4740 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4741 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4742 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4743 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4744
4745- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4746 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4747 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4748
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004749C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004750-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004751
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004752- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4753 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004755New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004757
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004758- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4759 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4760
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004761Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004763
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004764- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4765 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4766 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4767 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4768 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4769
4770- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4771 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4772 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4773 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4774
4775- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4776 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4777
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004778Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004780
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004781- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004782 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4783 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004784
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004785
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004786What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4787===========================
4788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4790
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004791Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004792----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004793
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004794- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4795 big to represent as a C double.
4796
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004797- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4798 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4799 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4800 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4801 restriction).
4802
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004803- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4804 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4805 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4806 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4807 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4808
4809 >>> dir([])
4810 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4811 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4812 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4813 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4814 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4815 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4816 'reverse', 'sort']
4817
4818 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4819
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004820- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004821 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4822 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4823 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4824 OverflowError exception.
4825
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004826- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004827 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004828 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4829 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4830 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4831 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4832 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004833 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4835 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4836
4837 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4838 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4839 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4840 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004841
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004842- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004843 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4844 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4845 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4846 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4847 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4848 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4849 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4850 once it is created.
4851
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004852- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4853 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4854 (key, value) pairs.
4855
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004856- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004857 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4858 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4859
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004860- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4861 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4862 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4863 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4864 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004865
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004866- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004867 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4868 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4869
4870 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4871
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004872- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004873 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4874
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004875Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004877
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004878- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004879 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4880 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004881
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004882- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4883 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4884 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4885 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4886 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4887 in this area anymore).
4888
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004889- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4890 threading.Timer.
4891
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004892- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4893 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4894
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004895- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004896 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4897
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004898- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004899 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4900 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4901 converted to Python longs.
4902
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004903- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004904 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4905
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004906- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4907 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4908 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4909
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004910Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004911-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004912
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004913- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4914 division operators as per PEP 238.
4915
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004916Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004918
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004919- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4920 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4921 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4922 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4923
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004924C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004926
4927- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004928
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004929- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4930 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004931 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004932
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4934 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004935 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004936 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004937
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004938- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004939 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4940 module:
4941
4942 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004943
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004944 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4945 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004946
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004947 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4948 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004949
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004950 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4951
4952 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4953
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004954- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004955 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4956 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4957 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004958
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004959New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004960-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004961
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004962- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4963 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4964 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4965 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4966 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004967
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004968Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004969-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004970
4971Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004973
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004974- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4975 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4976 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4977 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004978 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4979 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4980 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4981 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4982 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004983
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004984- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004985 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4986
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004987
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004988What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4989===========================
4990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004991*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4992
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004993Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004994-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004995
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004996- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4997 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4998
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004999- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5000 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5001 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005002
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005003- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5004 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5005 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5006 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005007
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005008- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5009
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005011
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005012Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005014
5015- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005016 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005017 the module docstring for details.
5018
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005019Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005021
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005022- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005023 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5024 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5025 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005026
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005027- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5028 Nick Mathewson.
5029
5030Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005032
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005033- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5034 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5035 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5036 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5037 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5038 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5039 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5040 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5041
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005042- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5043 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5044 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5045 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5046
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005047- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5048 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5049 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5050 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5051 come a long way).
5052
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005053- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5054 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5055 write filters for these warnings).
5056
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005057- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5058 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5059 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5060 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5061 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5062
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005063- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5064 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5065 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5066 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5067 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5068 older distribution.
5069
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005070Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005071-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005072
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005073- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5074 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005075 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005076
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005077- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5078 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5079 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5080
5081- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5082
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005083- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5084
5085- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5086
5087- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005089- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005090
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005091- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5092
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005093New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005095
5096C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005097-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005098
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005099- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5100 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5101 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5102 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5103 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5104 against buffer overruns.
5105
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005106- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005107 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5108 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005109 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5110 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5111 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5112
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005113- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5114 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5115 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5116 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5117 deprecated.
5118
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005119Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005121
5122- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5123 relevant is found.
5124
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005125
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005126What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005127===========================
5128
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005129*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5130
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005131Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005132----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005133
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005134- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5135 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5136 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5137 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5138 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5139 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5140 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5141 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005142 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005143 repaired.
5144
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005145- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005146 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005147 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5148 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5149 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5150 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5151 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5152 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5153 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5154 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5155
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005156- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5157 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5158 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5159 leading BMO character).
5160
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005161- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5162 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5163 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5164
5165 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5166 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5167 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005168
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005169 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5170 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5171 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5172 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5173 for various simple to use conversions.
5174
5175 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5176 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5177
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005178 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5179 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5180 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5181 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5182 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5183 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5184 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5185 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5186 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5187 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5188 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5189 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5190 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5191 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5192 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005193
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005194- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5195 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5196 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005197 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005198 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005199
5200 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005201 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5202 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5203 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5204 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5205 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005206 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5207 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005208
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005209 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5210 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5211 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005212 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005213
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005214- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5215 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5216 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5217 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5218 floating arithmetic,
5219
5220 x = 9007199254740992.0
5221 print long(x)
5222
5223 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5224 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5225 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5226 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5227 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5228 functions are of good quality).
5229
5230 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5231 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5232 algorithms to break.
5233
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005234- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5235 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5236 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5237 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5238 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5239 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5240 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5241 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5242 order.
5243
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005244- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5245 operation along the most common code paths.
5246
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005247- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5248 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5249
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005250- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5251 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5252 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5253 {}.update(UserDict())
5254
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005255- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5256 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5257 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5258 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5259 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5260 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5261 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5262 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5263
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005264- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005265 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005266
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005267 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005268 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5269 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005270 join() method of strings
5271 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005272 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5273 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005274 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005275 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005276
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005277- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5278 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5279
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005280- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5281 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5282
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005283- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5284 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5285 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5286 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5287
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005288- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5289 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005290 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005291 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5292 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005293
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005294- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5295
5296
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005297Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005298-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005299
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005300- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005301 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005302 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5303 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5304
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005305- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5306 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5307
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005308- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5309 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5310 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5311 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5312
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005313- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5314 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5315 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5316
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005317- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5318
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005319- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5320
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005321- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5322 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5323 that are still imported into string.py).
5324
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005325- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5326
5327- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5328 Now it does.
5329
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005330- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5331
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005332- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5333 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5334 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5335 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5336 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005337 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5338 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005339
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005340- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5341 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5342 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5343 'help(object)'.
5344
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005345Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005346-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005347
5348- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005349 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005350 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5351 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5352
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005353- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005354 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5355 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005356
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005357C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005358-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005359
5360- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5361 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005362
5363----
5364
5365**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**