blob: bc77b7d17278c875a62977db8dc48b3e1fe17af5 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000015- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
16
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000017- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
18 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
19
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000020- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
21 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
22 modified the list.
23
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000024- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
25 functions is now writable.
26
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000027- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
28 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
29 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
30 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
31
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000032- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
33 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
34 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
35 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
36 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000037
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000038- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
39 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
40
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000044- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
45 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
46 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
47 supposed to have been truncated away.
48
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000049- Added socket.socketpair().
50
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000051Library
52-------
53
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000054- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
55
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000056- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
57
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000058- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
59 Percivall.
60
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000061- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
62 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
63
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000064- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
65 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
66 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000067 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000068
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000069- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
70 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
71 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
72 and exponent.
73
74- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
75
76- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
77 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
78 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
79
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000080- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
81 to the readline module.
82
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000083- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000084 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
85 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000086
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000087- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
88 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
89 contains symlinks.
90
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000091- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
92 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
93
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000094- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
95 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
96 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
97
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000098- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
99 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
100 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
101 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
102 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
103 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
104 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
105 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
106 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
107 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
108 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
109 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
110 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
111
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000112- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
113
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000114Tools/Demos
115-----------
116
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000117- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
118 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
119
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000120- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
121
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000122Build
123-----
124
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000125- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
126 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
127
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000128- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
129 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
130
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000131- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
132 GNU/k*BSD systems.
133
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000134- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
135 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
136
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000137C API
138-----
139
140Documentation
141-------------
142
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000143- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
144 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
145
146- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
147 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
148 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000149
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000150New platforms
151-------------
152
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000153- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
154
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000155Tests
156-----
157
158Windows
159-------
160
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000161- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
162 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
163 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
164 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
165 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
166 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
167 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
168 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
169 the problem.
170
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000171Mac
172---
173
174
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000175What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
176=================================
177
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000178*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000179
180Core and builtins
181-----------------
182
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000183- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
184 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
185 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
186 sensitive code.
187
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000188- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
189 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
190 @staticmethod
191 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000192 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000193
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000194- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
195 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
196 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
197 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
198 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
199 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
200 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
201 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
202 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
203 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
204 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
205
206 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
207 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
208 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
209 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
210 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
211 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
212 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
213
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000214- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
215 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
216
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000217- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000218 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000219
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000220- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000221 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000222 which was missing for no apparent reason.
223
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000224- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000225 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
226 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
227
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000228- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
229 types that support garbage collection.
230
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000231- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
232
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000233- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
234 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
235 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
236 Jython.
237
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000238- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
239
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000240- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
241 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
242
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000243- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
244 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
245 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000246
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000247- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
248 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
249 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
250
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000251Extension modules
252-----------------
253
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000254- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
255
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000256Library
257-------
258
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000259- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
260 TIS-620
261
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000262- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
263 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
264 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
265 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
266 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
267 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
268 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
269 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
270 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
271 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
272
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000273- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
274
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000275- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
276 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
277 same as when the argument is omitted).
278 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
279
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000280- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
281
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000282- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
283 schemes are offered.
284
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000285- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
286
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000287- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
288 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
289 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
290
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000291- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
292
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000293- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
294 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
295
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000296- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
297 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
298 when dummy_threading is being used.
299
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000300- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
301 from a tarfile.
302
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000303- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000304 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000305
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000306- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
307 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
308 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
309 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
310
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000311- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
312 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
313
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000314- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
315 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
316 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
317 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
318 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
319 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
320 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
321 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
322 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
323 by some other method in progress).
324
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000325- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
326 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
327 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000328
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000329- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
330
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000331- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
332 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
333 AM Kuchling.
334
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000335- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
336 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
337 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
338
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000339- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
340 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
341 instead of unsigned.
342
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000343- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000344 no longer part of the public API.
345
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000346- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
347 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
348 string methods of the same name).
349
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000350- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000351 SF patch 945642.
352
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000353- doctest unittest integration improvements:
354
355 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
356
357 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
358 DocTestSuites.
359
360- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
361 that provide thread-local data.
362
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000363- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
364 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
365
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000366- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
367
368- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
369 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
370 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
371
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000372- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
373
374 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
375 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
376 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000377
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000378 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
379 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
380 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
381 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
382
383 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
384 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
385
386 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
387 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
388 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
389 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
390
391 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
392 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
393 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
394 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
395 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
396
397 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
398 wrapping help output.
399
400 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
401 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
402 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000403
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000404C API
405-----
406
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000407- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
408 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
409 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
410 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
411 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
412 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
413 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
414 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
415 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
416 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
417 its visible semantics have not changed.
418
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000419- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
420 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
421
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000422Documentation
423-------------
424
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000425- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000426
427 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000428 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000429
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000430 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000431
432 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
433
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000434- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000435
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000436Tests
437-----
438
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000439- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000440 platforms that use the Makefile.
441
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000442- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
443 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
444 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
445
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000446
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000447What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
448=================================
449
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000450*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000451
452Core and builtins
453-----------------
454
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000455- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
456 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
457 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
458 objects now (one object instead of three).
459
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000460- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
461 Windows DLLs.
462
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000463- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
464 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000465
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000466- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
467 a new .pyc magic.
468
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000469- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
470 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
471 be there.
472
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000473- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
474 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
475 the LC_NUMERIC category.
476
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000477- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
478 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
479 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
480
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000481- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
482
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000483- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
484 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
485 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000486
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000487- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
488 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
489
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000490- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
491
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000492- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000493 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000494
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000495- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
496
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000497- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
498
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000499- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
500 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
501
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000502- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
503 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
504 Fixes bug #858016 .
505
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000506- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
507 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
508 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
509
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000510- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
511 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
512 improves their performance (about 35%).
513
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000514- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
515 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
516 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
517
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000518- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
519 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
520 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
521 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
522
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000523- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
524 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
525 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
526 length is not known).
527
528- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
529 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000530 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
531 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000532 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
533
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000534- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
535 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
536
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000537- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
538 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
539 keyword arguments.
540
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000541- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
542 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
543 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
544
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000545- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
546 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
547 cases.
548
549- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
550 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
551 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
552 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
553 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
554 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
555 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
556 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
557 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
558 a release build.
559
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000560- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
561 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
562
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000563- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000564 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000565
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000566- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
567 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
568 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
569 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
570 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
571 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
572 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
573 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
574 destroyed.
575
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000576- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
577 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
578 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
579 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
580 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
581 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
582 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
583 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
584
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000585- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
586 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
587 character other than a space.
588
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000589- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
590 by the function object or by the method object, the function
591 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
592 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
593 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
594 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
595 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
596 attributes with the same name.
597
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000598- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
599 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
600 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
601 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
602 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
603 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
604 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
605 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
606 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
607 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
608 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
609 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
610 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
611 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000612
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000613- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
614 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
615 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
616 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
617 This has been repaired.
618
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000619- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
620
621- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
622
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000623- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
624 over a sequence.
625
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000626- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000627 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000628
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000629- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
630
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000631- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
632 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
633 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
634 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
635 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
636 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
637 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
638 records with equal keys is unchanged).
639
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000640- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
641 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
642 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
643
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000644- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
645 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
646 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
647 freelist.
648
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000649- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
650 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
651
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000652- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
653 number.
654
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000655- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
656 a TypeError exception.
657
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000658- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
659 820195.
660
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000661- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
662 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
663 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
664
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000665- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000666 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
667 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000668
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000669- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
670 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
671 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
672
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000673- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
674 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000675 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000676
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000677- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000678 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
679 the first call.
680
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000681
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000682Extension modules
683-----------------
684
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000685- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
686 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
687
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000688- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
689 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
690 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
691 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
692 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
693 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
694 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000695
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000696- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
697
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000698- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
699
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000700- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
701 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
702
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000703- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
704 fewer false positives.
705
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000706- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
707 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
708
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000709- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000710 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
711
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000712- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000713 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000714 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
715 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
716 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000717
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000718- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
719 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
720 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
721 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
722
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000723- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
724 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
725 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
726 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
727 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
728 #897625.
729
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000730- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
731 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
732
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000733- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
734 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
735 and pops on either side of the deque.
736
737- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
738 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
739
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000740- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
741 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
742 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
743 other functions that expect a function argument.
744
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000745- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
746
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000747- os.getsid was added.
748
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000749- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
750 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
751 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
752
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000753- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
754
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000755- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
756
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000757- readline.clear_history was added.
758
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000759- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
760
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000761- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
762
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000763- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
764
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000765- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
766
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000767- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
768
769- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
770
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000771- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
772
773- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
774
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000775- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
776 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
777 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
778
779- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
780 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
781 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
782 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
783 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
784 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
785 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
786
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000787- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
788 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
789 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
790 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000791
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000792- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000793 iterators from a single iterable.
794
795- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
796 of raising a TypeError exception.
797
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000798- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
799 as parameter.
800
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000801Library
802-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000803
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000804- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
805 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
806 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000807
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000808- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
809 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
810 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000811
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000812- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000813
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000814- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
815 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000816
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000817- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
818 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
819
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000820- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
821
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000822- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000823 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000824
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000825- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
826 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
827
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000828- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
829
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000830- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
831 on cygwin and mingw32.
832
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000833- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
834
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000835- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
836 module.
837
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000838- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
839 installation scheme for all platforms.
840
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000841- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000842 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000843
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000844- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
845 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
846 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
847
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000848- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
849 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
850 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
851
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000852- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
853
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000854- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
855
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000856- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
857 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
858
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000859- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
860 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
861 type pattern with the same value exists.
862
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000863- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
864 when run from the command prompt).
865
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000866- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
867 not taken into consideration when caching value.
868
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000869- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
870 default sort).
871
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000872- Added global runctx function to profile module
873
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000874- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
875
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000876- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
877
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000878- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
879
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000880- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000881 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
882 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
883 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
884 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
885 accordingly.
886
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000887- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
888 decoding standards.
889
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000890- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
891 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
892 called for all requests.
893
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000894- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
895 they are passed to the compiler.
896
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000897- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
898 indent, width and depth.
899
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000900- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
901 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
902
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000903- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
904 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
905
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000906- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
907
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000908- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
909
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000910- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
911
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000912- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
913 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
914
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000915- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000916 for better performance.
917
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000918- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000919
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000920- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
921 a string).
922
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000923- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
924
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000925- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
926
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000927- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
928
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000929- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
930
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000931- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
932 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
933 list of fieldnames.
934
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000935- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
936 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
937
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000938- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
939
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000940- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
941 empty lists.
942
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000943- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
944 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
945 and shelves.
946
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000947- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
948 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
949
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000950- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000951 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
952 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000953
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000954- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
955 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000956 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000957
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000958- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000959 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
960 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
961
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000962- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
963 and removed in Py2.4.
964
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000965- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
966
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000967- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
968
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000969Tools/Demos
970-----------
971
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000972- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
973 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
974
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000975- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
976
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000977- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
978 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
979 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
980 destination in situations where both files are given.
981
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000982- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
983 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
984 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
985 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
986
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000987- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
988
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000989- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
990 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
991 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
992 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
993 now.
994
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000995- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
996 in effect
997
998- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
999 C-c C-h
1000
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001001- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1002 -d option was given.
1003
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001004Build
1005-----
1006
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001007- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1008 build under OS X.
1009
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001010- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1011 --enable-profiling.
1012
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001013- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1014 is configured --with-tsc.
1015
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001016- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1017 on AMD64.
1018
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001019- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1020 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1021
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001022- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1023 removed.
1024
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001025- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1026 supported (see PEP 11).
1027
1028- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1029
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001030- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1031
1032- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1033 (see PEP 11).
1034
1035- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1036 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1037
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001038C API
1039-----
1040
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001041- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1042 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1043 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1044
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001045- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1046 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1047 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1048 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1049
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001050- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1051 generator objects.
1052
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001053- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1054 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001055 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1056 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001057
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001058- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1059 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1060
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001061- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1062 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1063 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1064 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1065 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1066
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001067- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1068 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1069 about 10% faster.
1070
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001071- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1072 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1073
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001074- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1075 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1076 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1077 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1078
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001079Windows
1080-------
1081
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001082- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1083 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1084 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1085 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1086
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001087- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1088 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1089 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1090
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001091
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001092What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1093===============================
1094
1095*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1096
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001097IDLE
1098----
1099
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001100- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1101 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1102 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1103 context-menu actions.
1104
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001105- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1106 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1107 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1108 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1109 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1110 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1111 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1112 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1113 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1114
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001115
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001116What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1117=============================================
1118
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001119*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001120
1121Core and builtins
1122-----------------
1123
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001124- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001125 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001126 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1127
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001128Extension modules
1129-----------------
1130
1131- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1132 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1133 than once. This has been fixed.
1134
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001135- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1136 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1137 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1138 call.
1139
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001140- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1141
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001142Library
1143-------
1144
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001145- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1146 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1147
1148- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1149 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1150 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1151 restored.
1152
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001153IDLE
1154----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001155
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001156- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001157
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001158Build
1159-----
1160
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001161- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1162 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1163
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001164C API
1165-----
1166
1167Windows
1168-------
1169
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001170- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1171 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1172
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001173- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1174
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001175Mac
1176---
1177
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001178- Various fixes to pimp.
1179
1180- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1181
1182- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1183 more problems than it solves.
1184
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001185
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001186What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1187=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001188
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001189*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1190
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001191Core and builtins
1192-----------------
1193
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001194- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1195 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1196
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001197- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1198 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001199 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001200
1201- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1202 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1203 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001204 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001205
1206- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1207 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001208
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001209- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1210 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1211 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1212
1213- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001214 770247.
1215
1216- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001217
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001218Extension modules
1219-----------------
1220
1221- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1222 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1223
1224- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1225
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001226- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1227
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001228- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1229 contained within the _strptime module.
1230
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001231- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1232 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1233
1234- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001235 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1236
1237- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1238 the find_class attribute, if present.
1239
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001240- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001241
1242 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1243 (SF bug 763298).
1244
1245 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001246 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1247 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1248 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001249
1250 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1251
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001252Library
1253-------
1254
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001255- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1256
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001257- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1258 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1259 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1260 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1261 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1262 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1263 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1264 or Tester().
1265
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001266- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1267 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1268 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1269 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1270 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1271 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1272 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1273 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1274 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001275
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001276 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001277
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001278- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1279 weren't before was an oversight.
1280
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001281- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1282 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1283
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001284- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1285 when there are no lines.
1286
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001287- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1288 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1289
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001290- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1291 to child processes.
1292
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001293- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1294
1295- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1296
1297- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1298 xmlrpclib.
1299
1300- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1301 responses.
1302
1303- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1304 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1305
1306- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1307 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1308 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1309
1310- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1311 used as patterns.
1312
1313- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1314 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1315 than Tk 8.3.
1316
1317- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1318
1319- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001320
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001321Tools/Demos
1322-----------
1323
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001324- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1325
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001326- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1327
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001328- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001329
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001330Build
1331-----
1332
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001333- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1334
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001335- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1336
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001337- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1338 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001339
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001340- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1341 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1342 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001343
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001344C API
1345-----
1346
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001347- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1348 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1349
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001350Windows
1351-------
1352
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001353- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1354 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1355 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1356 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1357 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1358 Python exception ::
1359
1360 thread.error: can't start new thread
1361
1362 is raised now.
1363
1364- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1365 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1366 instead of from DLL teardown.
1367
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001368Mac
1369---
1370
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001371- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001372 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001373 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1374 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1375 the executable in the bundle.
1376
1377- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001378
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001379- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1380
1381- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1382 on Panther.
1383
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001384What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1385================================
1386
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001387*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001388
1389Core and builtins
1390-----------------
1391
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001392- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1393 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1394 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1395 with the -i option.
1396
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001397- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1398 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1399
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001400- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1401 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1402
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001403- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1404 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1405 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1406 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1407 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1408 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1409 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1410 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1411 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1412 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1413 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1414 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1415 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001416
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001417- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1418 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1419 embedded in a lambda expression.
1420
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001421- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1422 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1423 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1424 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1425 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1426
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001427- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1428 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1429 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1430
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001431- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1432 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1433
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001434- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1435 It's writable again.
1436
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001437- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1438 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1439 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001440 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001441
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001442- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1443 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1444 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1445
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001446Extension modules
1447-----------------
1448
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001449- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1450 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1451
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001452- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1453 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1454 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1455 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1456
1457- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1458 collection.
1459
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001460- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1461 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1462 unique within a single program run.
1463
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001464- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1465 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1466
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001467- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1468 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1469
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001470- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1471 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001472
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001473- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1474
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001475- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1476 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1477
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001478- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1479 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1480 for many BSD-derived systems.
1481
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001482
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001483Library
1484-------
1485
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001486- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1487 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1488 primary ones:
1489
1490 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1491 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1492 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1493
1494 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1495 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1496 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1497 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1498 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1499 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1500
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001501- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1502 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1503 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1504 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1505 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1506 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1507 argument.
1508
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001509- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1510 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1511 in the archive.
1512
1513- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1514 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1515
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001516- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1517 569574).
1518
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001519- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1520 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1521 no more.
1522
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001523- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1524 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1525 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1526 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1527 code coverage.
1528
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001529- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1530 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1531 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001532 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1533 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001534
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001535- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1536 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1537 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001538 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001539
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001540- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1541
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001542- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1543 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1544 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1545 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1546
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001547- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1548 handling.
1549
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001550- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1551 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1552
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001553- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1554 in socket.py.
1555
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001556- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1557
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001558- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1559 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1560 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1561 opener with proxy support.
1562
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001563- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1564
1565- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1566
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001567Tools/Demos
1568-----------
1569
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001570- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1571
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001572- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1573
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001574- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1575 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001576
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001577- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1578 files.
1579
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001580Build
1581-----
1582
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001583- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001584 different root directory.
1585
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001586C API
1587-----
1588
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001589- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1590 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1591 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1592 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1593 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1594 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1595 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1596 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1597 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1598 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1599
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001600- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1601 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1602 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1603 from Python.
1604
1605
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001606New platforms
1607-------------
1608
1609None this time.
1610
1611Tests
1612-----
1613
1614- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1615 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1616
1617Windows
1618-------
1619
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001620- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1621
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001622- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1623 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1624 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1625 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1626 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1627 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1628 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1629 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1630 that's what it's for.
1631
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001632Mac
1633---
1634
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001635- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1636 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1637 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1638 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001639- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1640 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1641- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001642
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001643SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1644------------------------------------
1645
1646430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1647598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1648622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1649661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1650683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1651697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1652713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1653724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1654727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1655729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1656730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1657731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1658732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1659733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1660735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1661740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1662744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1663745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1664747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1665749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1666751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1667753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1668755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1669757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1670760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1671
1672
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001673What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1674================================
1675
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001676*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001677
1678Core and builtins
1679-----------------
1680
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001681- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1682 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1683
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001684- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1685 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1686 and cannot be strings).
1687
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001688- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1689 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1690 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1691 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1692
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001693- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1694 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1695 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1696 Python itself.
1697
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001698- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1699 the referenced object, if it has one.
1700
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001701- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1702 the thread started at
1703 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1704
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001705- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1706 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1707 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1708 placed on a list index.
1709
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001710- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1711 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1712 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1713 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1714
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001715- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1716 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1717 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1718 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1719 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1720 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1721 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1722
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001723- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1724 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1725 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1726 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1727 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1728
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001729- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1730 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001731
1732- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1733 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1734 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1735 #693195.)
1736
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001737- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1738 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001739
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001740- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001741 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001742 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1743 interpreter executions, would fail.
1744
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001745- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001746 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001747 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001748
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001749Extension modules
1750-----------------
1751
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001752- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1753 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1754 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1755 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1756
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001757- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1758 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1759
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001760- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1761 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1762 and Greg Chapman.)
1763
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001764- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1765 recursively.
1766
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001767- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001768 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1769 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1770 leaks.
1771
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001772- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1773
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001774- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1775 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1776 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1777 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1778 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1779 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1780 #705836.
1781
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001782- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001783 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1784
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001785- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1786 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1787 See SF bug #692416.
1788
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001789- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1790 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1791
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001792- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1793 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1794 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001795
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001796- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001797 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1798 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1799
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001800- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1801 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1802 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1803 timeouts to work properly.
1804
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001805Library
1806-------
1807
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001808- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1809 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1810 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1811 future release.
1812
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001813- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1814 for querying platform dependent features.
1815
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001816- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001817
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001818- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1819 pickle protocol versions.
1820
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001821- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1822 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1823 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1824
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001825- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1826
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001827- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1828 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1829 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1830 modules.
1831
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001832- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1833 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1834 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1835
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001836- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1837 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1838
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001839- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1840 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1841 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1842
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001843- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001844 MS Office extensions.
1845
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001846- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1847 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1848
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001849- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1850 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1851
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001852- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1853 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1854 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1855 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1856 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1857 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1858
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001859- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1860 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1861 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001862
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001863- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1864 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1865 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1866
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001867- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1868
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001869- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1870 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1871 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1872
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001873Tools/Demos
1874-----------
1875
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001876- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1877 See the module docstring for details.
1878
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001879Build
1880-----
1881
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001882- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1883 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001884
1885C API
1886-----
1887
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001888- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1889
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001890- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1891 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1892 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1893
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001894- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1895 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001896
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001897 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1898 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1899 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001900
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001901- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001902 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1903
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001904- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1905 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1906 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001907
1908New platforms
1909-------------
1910
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001911None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001912
1913Tests
1914-----
1915
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001916- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1917 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001918
1919Windows
1920-------
1921
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001922- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1923 function.
1924
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001925- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1926 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001927
1928Mac
1929---
1930
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001931- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1932 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001933
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001934- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1935 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001936
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001937- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1938 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1939 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001940
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001941- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001942 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1943 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001944
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001945- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1946 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001947
1948
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001949What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1950=================================
1951
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001952*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001953
1954Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001955-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001956
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001957- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1958 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1959 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1960
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001961- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1962 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1963 (SF patch #664376.)
1964
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001965- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1966 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1967 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1968 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1969 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1970 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001971 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001972
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001973- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1974 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1975 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1976 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001977 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001978
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001979- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1980 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1981 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1982 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1983 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1984 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1985 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1986 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1987 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1988 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1989 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1990
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001991- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1992 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1993 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1994 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1995 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1996 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1997
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001998- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1999 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2000
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002001- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2002 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2003 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2004 case.)
2005
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002006- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2007 passed as unicode strings.
2008
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002009- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2010 See SF bug #683467.
2011
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002012- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2013 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2014
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002015- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2016
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002017- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2018
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002019- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2020 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2021 arguments.
2022
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002023- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2024 See SF bug #667147.
2025
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002026- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002027 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002028 See SF bug #676155.
2029
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002030- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002031 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002032 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2033 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2034 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2035 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2036 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2037 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002038
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002039Extension modules
2040-----------------
2041
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002042- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2043 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2044 tp_as_number pointer.
2045
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002046- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2047 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2048 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2049 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2050 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2051
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002052- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2053
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002054- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2055
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002056- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002057 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002058 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2059 patch #678531.)
2060
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002061- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2062 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2063
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002064- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2065 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2066
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002067- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2068
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002069- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2070 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2071 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2072
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002073- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2074
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002075- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2076 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2077
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002078- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002079
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002080- datetime changes:
2081
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002082 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2083
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002084 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2085 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2086 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2087 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2088 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2089 now.
2090
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002091 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002092 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2093 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002094
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002095 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002096 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002097 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2098 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2099 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2100 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002101
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002102 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2103 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2104 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002105 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2106
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002107 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2108 by a later example coded by Guido.
2109
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002110 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002111 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2112 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2113 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002114 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2115 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2116
2117 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2118 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2119 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2120 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2121 tzinfo subclass instance.
2122
2123 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2124 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2125 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2126 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2127 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2128 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2129 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2130 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002131
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002132 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2133 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2134 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2135 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2136 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002137 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2138
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002139 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002140
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002141 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2142 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2143 as a naive datetime object.
2144
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002145 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2146 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2147 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2148
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002149 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2150 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2151 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2152 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2153 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2154 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2155 comparison.
2156
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002157 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2158 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2159 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2160 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002161 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002162
2163 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002164
2165 and ::
2166
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002167 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2168
2169 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2170 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2171 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2172 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2173
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002174 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2175 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2176 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2177 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2178 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2179
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002180 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2181 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002182 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2183 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002184
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002185Library
2186-------
2187
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002188- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2189 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2190
2191- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2192 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2193 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2194 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2195 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2196 See PEP 307 for details.
2197
2198- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2199 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2200
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002201- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2202 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002203 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002204 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2205 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002206 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002207
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002208- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2209 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2210
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002211- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2212 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2213 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2214
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002215- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2216
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002217- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2218 exception.
2219
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002220- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2221 class.
2222
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002223- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2224 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2225 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2226
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002227- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2228 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2229
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002230- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002231 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2232 See SF bug #659228.
2233
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002234- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2235 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2236 See SF patch #651082.
2237
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002238- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002239
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002240- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2241 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2242
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002243- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002244 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002245
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002246- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2247 DOS paths from other platforms.
2248
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002249Tools/Demos
2250-----------
2251
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002252- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2253 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2254 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2255 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2256 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2257 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2258 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2259 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2260 example:
2261
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002262 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2263 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002264
2265 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2266
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002267
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002268Build
2269-----
2270
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002271- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2272 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2273 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002274 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2275
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002276 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2277
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002278- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2279 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2280 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2281 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2282 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2283 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2284 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2285 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2286 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2287
2288- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2289 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2290 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2291 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2292
2293- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2294 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2295
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002296C API
2297-----
2298
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002299- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2300 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002301
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002302- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2303 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2304 tp_as_number pointer.
2305
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002306- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2307 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2308 (SF #681367)
2309
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002310- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2311 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2312 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2313 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002314
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002315Tests
2316-----
2317
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002318- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002319 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2320 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2321 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2322 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2323 pydoc.)
2324
2325- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2326
2327- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002328
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002329Windows
2330-------
2331
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002332- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2333 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2334 time).
2335
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002336- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2337 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2338
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002339- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2340 release without strong cryptography.
2341
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002342- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002343 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002344
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002345- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2346 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2347
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002348Mac
2349---
2350
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002351- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2352 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002353
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002354- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2355 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2356 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002357
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002358- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2359 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002360
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002361- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2362 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2363 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2364 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002365
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002366- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002367 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2368 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2369 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002370
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002371
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002372What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002373=================================
2374
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002375*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002377Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002378--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002379
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002380- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2381
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002382- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2383 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002384 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002385 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002386 a different meaning than before.
2387
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002388- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002389 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002390 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002391
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002392- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002393 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002394 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002395
2396- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2397 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2398 and deallocation.
2399
2400- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2401 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2402
2403- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2404 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2405 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2406 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2407 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2408
2409- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2410 now detected by the garbage collector.
2411
2412- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2413 [SF bug 519621]
2414
2415- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2416 identifier.
2417
2418- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2419 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2420 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2421 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2422 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2423 [SF bug 563060]
2424
2425- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2426 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2427 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2428 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2429 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2430
2431- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2432 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2433 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2434
2435- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2436
2437- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2438 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2439 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2440 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2441 state of the slots would be lost.)
2442
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002443Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002444-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002445
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002446- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002447 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2448 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2449 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2450 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002451 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2452 Jython 2.1.
2453
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002454- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002455 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002456 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2457 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2458 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2459 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2460 these, see PEP 302.
2461
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002462- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2463 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2464 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2465
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002466- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2467 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2468 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2469
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002470- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2471 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2472 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2473
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002474- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2475 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2476 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2477 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2478 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2479 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2480 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2481 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2482 releases or implementations.
2483
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002484- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002485 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2486 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002487
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002488- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2489 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2490
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002491- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2492 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2493 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2494
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002495- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2496 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2497
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002498- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2499 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002500 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2501 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002502
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002503- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2504 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2505 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2506 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2507 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2508
2509 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2510 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2511 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2512 pattern.
2513
2514 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2515 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2516 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2517 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2518
2519 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2520 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2521 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2522 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2523 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2524 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2525
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002526- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2527 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2528 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2529 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2530 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2531 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2532 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2533 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002534
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002535- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2536 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2537 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2538 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2539 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002540 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2541 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2542 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2543 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2544 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2545 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2546 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002547
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002548- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2549 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2550
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002551- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2552 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2553 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2554 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2555 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2556 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2557 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2558 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2559 to Zack Weinberg!
2560
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002561- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2562 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2563 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2564 type. This has been fixed now.
2565
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002566- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2567 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2568 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2569
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002570- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2571 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2572 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2573 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2574 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2575 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2576 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2577 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002578 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002579
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002580- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2581 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2582 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002583
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002584- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2585 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2586 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2587 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2588 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2589 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2590 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2591 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002592 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002593 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2594 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2595
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002596- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2597 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2598 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2599 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2600 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2601 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2602 this.)
2603
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002604- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2605 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002606 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002607 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002608 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2609 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002610 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2611 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002612
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002613- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2614 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2615 currently running.
2616
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002617- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2618 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2619 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2620 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2621
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002622- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2623 as directory names.
2624
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002625- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2626 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2627
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002628- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2629 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2630
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002631- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002632 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2633 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002634
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002635- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2636 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2637 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2638 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2639 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2640
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002641- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2642 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2643 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2644 removed.
2645
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002646- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2647 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2648 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2649
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002650- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2651 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2652 to __debug__.
2653
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002654- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2655 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2656 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2657
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002658- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2659 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2660 deprecated now.
2661
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002662- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2663 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2664 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002665
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002666- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2667 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2668 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2669 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2670 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002671
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002672- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2673 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2674
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002675- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2676 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2677 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002678 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002679 is backward compatible.
2680
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002681- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2682 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2683 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2684 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2685 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2686
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002687- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2688 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2689 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2690 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2691 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2692 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002693
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002694- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2695 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2696
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002697- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2698 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2699
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002700- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2701 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2702 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2703 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2704 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2705
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002706- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2707 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2708 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2709
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002710- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002711 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2712
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002713- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2714 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2715 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002716
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002717- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2718 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2719
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002720- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2721 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2722 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2723
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002724- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2725
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002726Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002727-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002728
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002729- Added three operators to the operator module:
2730 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2731 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2732 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2733
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002734- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2735
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002736- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2737 archives.
2738
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002739- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2740 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2741 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2742
2743 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2744
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002745- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2746 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2747 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002748 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002749
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002750- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2751 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2752 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2753 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002754 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2755 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2756 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2757 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002758
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002759- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2760 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002761
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002762- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2763
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002764- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2765 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2766
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002767- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2768 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2769 supported.
2770
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002771- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2772
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002773- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2774 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002775
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002776- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2777 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2778
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002779- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2780
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002781- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2782 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2783
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002784- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2785 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2786 functions but callable type objects.
2787
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002788- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002789 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002790 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002791
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002792- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2793 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002794
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002795- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2796 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002797
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002798- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2799 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2800 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2801 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2802
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002803- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2804 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002805
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002806- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2807 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2808 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2809 and __imul__.
2810
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002811- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002812 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2813 is called.
2814
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002815- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2816 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2817 interpreter was compiled.
2818
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002819- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2820 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2821 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002822 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002823 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2824 1, not 2.
2825
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002826- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2827 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2828 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2829 limit.
2830
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002831- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2832 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2833 bug #623464.
2834
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002835- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2836 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2837 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2838 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2839
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002840Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002841-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002842
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002843- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2844
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002845- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2846 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2847 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2848 with Python 2.3a2.
2849
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002850- os.path exposes getctime.
2851
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002852- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002853 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002854 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002855 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002856 unit tests of floating point results.
2857
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002858- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2859 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2860 has been increased.
2861
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002862- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2863 executed.
2864
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002865- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2866 postinstallation script.
2867
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002868- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2869 test the current module.
2870
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002871- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002872 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2873 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2874 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2875 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2876
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002877- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002878 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002879 Ward's Optik package.
2880
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002881- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2882 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2883 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2884 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2885
2886- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2887 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002888 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002889
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002890- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2891 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2892 shelf are binary pickles.
2893
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002894- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2895 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2896
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002897- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2898 modules are iterators now.
2899
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002900- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2901 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2902 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2903 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2904 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2905 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002906
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002907- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2908 with their entity value.
2909
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002910- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2911
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002912- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2913 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002914
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002915- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2916 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002917 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002918
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002919- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2920 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2921 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2922 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2923 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2924 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2925 main():
2926
2927 import locale
2928 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2929
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002930- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2931 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2932
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002933- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2934 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2935 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2936 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2937 to the new standard.
2938
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002939- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2940 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2941 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2942 an extension to the database.
2943
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002944- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2945 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2946 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2947 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002948 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002949
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002950- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002951 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002952
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002953- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2954 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2955 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2956 bounded integers.
2957
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002958- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2959 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2960 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2961 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2962 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2963 in existence.
2964
2965 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2966 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2967 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2968 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2969 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2970 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2971
2972 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2973 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2974 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2975 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2976
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002977- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2978 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2979 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2980
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002981- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2982
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002983- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2984 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2985 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2986 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2987
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002988- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2989 argument.
2990
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002991- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2992 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2993 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2994 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2995 [SF patch 560794].
2996
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002997- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2998 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2999 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003000 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3001 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3002 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003003
3004- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3005 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003006
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003007- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3008 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3009 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3010 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003011
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003012- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3013 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3014 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3015 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3016 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3017
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003018- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003019
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003020- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3021
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003022- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3023 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3024 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3025 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3026 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3027 identical to None.
3028
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003029- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3030 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3031 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3032 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3033 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3034 results now.
3035
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003036- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3037 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3038
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003039- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3040 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3041 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3042 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3043 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3044 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3045 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3046 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3047
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003048- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3049
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003050- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3051 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3052
3053- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3054 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3055 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3056 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3057 and other systems.
3058
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003059- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3060 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3061 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3062 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 +00003063 work well with these.
3064
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003065- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3066
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003067- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003068 connections.
3069
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003070- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3071 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3072 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3073
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003074- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3075 sets
3076
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003077- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3078 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3079 name.
3080
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003081- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3082 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3083 passed in.
3084
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003085- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003086 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003087 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3088 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003089
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003090- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3091
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003092- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3093
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003094- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3095 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3096 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3097
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003098- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3099 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3100 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3101 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003102 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003103
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003104- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003105 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003106 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003107
3108- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3109 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3110 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3111
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003112- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003113 the value of its expression argument.
3114
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003115- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3116 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3117 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3118
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003119- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3120 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3121 skipstone browser was included.
3122
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003123- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3124 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3125
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003126Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003127-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003128
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003129- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3130 names in addition to accepting file names.
3131
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003132- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3133 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3134 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3135 still used and useful.)
3136
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003137- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3138 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3139 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3140 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003141
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003142- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3143 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3144 the generated binary.
3145
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003146Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003147-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003148
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003149- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3150
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003151- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3152 except in the hands of experts.
3153
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003154- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003155 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3156 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3157 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003158
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003159- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3160 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3161 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3162 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3163 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3164 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3165 builds.
3166
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003167- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3168 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3169 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3170 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3171 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3172 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3173 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3174 new type.
3175
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003176- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003177
3178 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3179 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3180 positive infinities.
3181
3182 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3183 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3184 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3185 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3186 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3187 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3188 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3189
3190 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3191
3192 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3193
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003194- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3195 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3196 size of the executable.
3197
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003198- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3199 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3200 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3201 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003202
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003203- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3204
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003205- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3206 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3207 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003208
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003209- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3210 well as Unix.
3211
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003212- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3213 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3214 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3215 modules in the README file for details.
3216
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003217C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003219
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003220- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3221 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003222 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003223 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003224 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003225
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003226- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3227 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3228 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3229 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3230 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3231 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003232 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003233 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3234 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3235 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3236 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3237 aligned.)
3238
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003239- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3240 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3241 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3242
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003243- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3244 level.
3245
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003246- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3247 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3248 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3249 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3250 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3251
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003252- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3253 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3254 code.
3255
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003256- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3257 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3258 adjusting for negative indices.
3259
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003260- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3261 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3262 object.
3263
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003264- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3265 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3266 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3267
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003268- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3269 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003270
3271- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3272
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003273- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3274 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3275 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3276 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3277
3278- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3279
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003280- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003281
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003282- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003283 without going through the buffer API.
3284
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003286
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003287- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3288 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3289 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3290 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003292- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3293 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3294
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003295- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003296 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3297
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003298New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003300
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003301- OpenVMS is now supported.
3302
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003303- AtheOS is now supported.
3304
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003305- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3306
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003307- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003309Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310-----
3311
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003312- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3313 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3314 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003315
3316Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003318
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003319- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3320 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3321 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3322 bugs.
3323 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003324 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003325 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3326 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003327 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003328
3329- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003330 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003331
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003332- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3333 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3334
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003335- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3336 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003337 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003338 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3339
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003340- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3341 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3342 use files" uninstall option).
3343
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003344- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3345
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003346- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3347 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3348
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003349- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3350 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3351 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3352
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003353- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3354 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3355 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3356 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3357 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003358 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3359 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3360 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003361
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003362- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003363 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003364 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3365 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3366 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3367 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3368 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3369 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3370 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3371 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3372 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3373 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3374 work around.
3375
3376- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3377 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3378 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3379 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3380 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3381 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3382 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3383 specified with O_CREAT too).
3384
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003385Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003386----
3387
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003388- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003389
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003390- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3391 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3392 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3393
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003394- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3395 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3396 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3397
3398- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3399 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3400 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3401 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3402 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3403 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3404 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3405 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003406
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003407- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3408 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3409 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003410
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003411- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3412 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3413 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3414 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3415 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003416
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003417- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3418 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3419 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003420
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003421- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3422 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003423
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003424- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3425 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3426 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3427 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3428 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003429
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003430- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3431 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3432 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3433
3434- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3435 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3436 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003437
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003438- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3439 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3440 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3441 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003442 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003443
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003444- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3445 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003447- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3448 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003449
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003450- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003451 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003452 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3453 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003454
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003455
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003456What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003457===============================
3458
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3460
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003461Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003463
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003464- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3465 with a custom metaclass.
3466
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003467Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003468-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003469
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003470- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3471 are proxies.
3472
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003473Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003474-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003475
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003476- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3477 very short strings.
3478
3479- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3480 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3481 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3482 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3483 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3484
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003485Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003487
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003488- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3489 close or delete time).
3490
3491- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3492 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3493
3494- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3495
3496- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003497 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003498
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003499Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003501
3502Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003504
3505C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003506-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003507
3508New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003510
3511Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003513
3514Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003515-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003516
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003517- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3518
3519- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3520 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3521
3522- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3523 deleted at process exit time.
3524
3525- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3526 in backslash.
3527
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003528Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003530
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003531- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3532 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3533 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3534
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003535
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003536What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003537===========================
3538
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3540
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003541Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003543
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003544- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3545 been extensively updated. See
3546
3547 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3548
3549 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3550
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003551- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3552 deleted!
3553
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003554- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3555 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3556 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3557 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3558 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3559
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003560- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3561
3562 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3563 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3564
3565 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3566 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3567 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3568 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3569 supported anyway.
3570
3571 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3572 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3573
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003574- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3575 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3576 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3577 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3578 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003579
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003580- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3581 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3582 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3583
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003584Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003586
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003587- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3588 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3589 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3590 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3591 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3592 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003593 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3594 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3595 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3596 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003597
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003598- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3599 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3600 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3601
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003602Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003603-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003604
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003605- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3606
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003607Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003609
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003610- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3611 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3612 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3613 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3614 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3615 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3616
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003617- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3618
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003619- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3620
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003621- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3622
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003623- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3624 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3625 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3626
3627- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3628
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003629Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003631
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003632- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3633 off a search on Google.
3634
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003635Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003637
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003638- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3639 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3640 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3641 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3642 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3643 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3644 other platforms should do likewise.
3645
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003646- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3647 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3648 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3649
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003650C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003652
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003653- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3654 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3655 producing key-value pairs.
3656
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003657- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003658 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003659 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3660 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3661 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3662 previously went unchallenged.
3663
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003664New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003666
3667Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003668-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003669
3670Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003672
3673Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003675
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003676- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3677 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003678
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003679- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3680 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3681 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3682 home.
3683
3684
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003685What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003686===========================
3687
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3689
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003690Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003692
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003693- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3694 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003695
3696 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003697 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003698
3699 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3700 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003701 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003702 This needs to be documented.
3703
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003704- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3705 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3706
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003707- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3708 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3709 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3710
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003711- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3712 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3713
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003714- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3715 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3716 class forbids it).
3717
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003718- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3719 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3720 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3721
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003722- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3723
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003724Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003726
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003727- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3728 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003729 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003730
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003731- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3732 (like 1 + '').
3733
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003734Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003735-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003736
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003737- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3738 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3739 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3740 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003741 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003742 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3743
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003744- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3745 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3746 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3747 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3748
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003749- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3750 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003751 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3752 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3753 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003754
3755- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3756 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003757
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003758- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3759 bytes on its input.
3760
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003761Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003763
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003764- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003765 convenience function.
3766
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003767- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3768 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3769 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003770 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3771 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3772 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3773 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3774 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3775 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003776
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003777- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3778 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3779 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3780 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3781
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003782- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3783 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3784 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3785
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003786- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3787 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3788 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3789 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3790
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003791- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3792 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003794 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3795 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3796 new -l and -e options.
3797
3798- statcache is now deprecated.
3799
3800- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3801 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003803 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3804 time properly taken into account.
3805
3806- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3807 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3808 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3809 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3810
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003811Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003813
3814Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003816
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003817- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3818 is built with libdb3 if available.
3819
3820- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3821
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003822C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003824
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003825- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3826 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3827 PySequence_Size().
3828
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003829- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3830
3831- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3832 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3833 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3834
3835- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3836 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3837
3838- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3839 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3840
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003841New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003843
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003844- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3845 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3846
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003847- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3848 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3849
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003850- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3851
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003852Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003854
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003855- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3856 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3857
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003858Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003860
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003861Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003863
3864- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3865 removed completely in the next release.
3866
3867- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3868 OSX.
3869
3870- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3871 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3872
3873- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3874
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003875
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003876What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003877===========================
3878
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3880
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003881Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003883
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003884- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003885 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003886 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003887 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3888 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003889 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3890 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003891 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3892 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003893
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003894- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3895 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3896
3897- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3898 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3899
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003900Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003901-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003902
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003903- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3904 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3905 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3906 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3907 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3908 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3909 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3910 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3911
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003912- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3913 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3914 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3915 example).
3916
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003917- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003918 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003919 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003920 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003921
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003922- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3923 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3924 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003925 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003926
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003927- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3928 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3929 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3930 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3931 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3932 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3933
3934 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3935
3936 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3937
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003938Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003940
3941- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3942
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003943- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3944
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003945- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3946 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003947
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003948- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3949 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3950 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3951 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3952 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3953 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003954 attributes.
3955
3956- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3957 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3958 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003959
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003960- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3961 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3962 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003963
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003964- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3965 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3966 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003967 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3968 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3969
3970- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3971 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003972
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003973Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003975
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003976- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3977 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3978
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003979- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3980 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3981 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3982 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3983
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003984- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3985 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3986 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3987 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3988
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003989 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3990 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3991 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3992 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3993 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3994 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3995 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3996 without losing information).
3997
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003998- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003999 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4000 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4001 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4002 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4003 module).
4004
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004005 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004006 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4007 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4008 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4009 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004010
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004011- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004012 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4013 encoding.
4014
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004015- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4016 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4017
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004019 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4020
4021- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4022 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4023 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4024 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4025
4026- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4027
4028- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4029 ON, and OFF.
4030
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004031- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4032 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4033
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004034Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004036
4037- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4038 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4039 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004040
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004041- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4042 been added: -X and -E.
4043
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004044Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004046
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004047- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4048 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4049
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004050C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004052
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004053- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4054 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4055 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4056 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4057 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4058
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004059- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4060 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4061 as long) arguments.
4062
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004063- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4064 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4065 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4066 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4067 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4068 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4069
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004070- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4071 input.
4072
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004073New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004075
4076Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004078
4079Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004081
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004082- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4083 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4084 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4085
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004086- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4087 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4088 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004089 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4092 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4093 import signal
4094 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004095
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004097 while 1:
4098 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004100 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4101 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4102 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4103 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004104
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004105
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004106What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4107===========================
4108
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4110
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004111Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004113
4114- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4115 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4116 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4117
4118- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4119 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4120 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4121 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4122 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4123 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4124 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004125
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004126- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004127 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004128 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4129 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4130 associate a docstring with a property.
4131
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004132- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4133 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4134 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4135 other built-in object types.
4136
4137- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4138 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4139 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4140 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4141 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4142
4143- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4144 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4145
4146- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4147 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004148 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004149 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4150 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4151 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4152 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4153 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4154
4155- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4156 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4157 class.
4158
4159- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4160 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4161 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4162 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4163
4164- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4165 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4166 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4167 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4168
4169- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4170 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4171
4172- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4173 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4174 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4175 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4176 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004177 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004178 with the same value as s.
4179
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004180- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4181
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004182Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004183----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004184
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004185- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4186
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004187- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4188 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4189 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4190 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4191 objects.
4192
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004193- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4194 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004195 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4196 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4197
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004198- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4199 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4200 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4201
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004202Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004204
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004205- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4206 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4207 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4208 by the instances.
4209
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004210- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4211 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4212 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4213
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004214- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4215 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4216 before the entire comparison is complete.
4217
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004218- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4219 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4220 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4221
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004222- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4223 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4224 getwriter().
4225
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004226- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4227 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4228
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004229- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004230 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4231 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4232
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004233- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4234 iterable object.
4235
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004236- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4237 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004238
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004239- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4240 authentication.
4241
4242- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4243 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004244
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004245- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004246 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4247 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4248 a sample driver.)
4249
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004250Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004251-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004252
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004253- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4254 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4255 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4256 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4257 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4258 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4259 kernel has large file support.
4260
4261- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4262 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4263 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4264 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4265 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4266
4267- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4268 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4269 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4270
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004271C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004273
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004274- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4275 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4276
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004277New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004279
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004280- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4281 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4282
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004283Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004285
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004286- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4287 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4288 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4289 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4290 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4291
4292- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4293 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4294 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4295 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4296
4297- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4298 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4299
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004300Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004302
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004303- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004304 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4305 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004306
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004307
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004308What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4309===========================
4310
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004311*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4312
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004313Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004315
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004316- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4317 big to represent as a C double.
4318
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004319- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4320 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4321 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4322 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4323 restriction).
4324
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004325- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4326 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4327 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4328 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4329 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4330
4331 >>> dir([])
4332 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4333 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4334 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4335 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4336 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4337 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4338 'reverse', 'sort']
4339
4340 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4341
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004342- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004343 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4344 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4345 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4346 OverflowError exception.
4347
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004348- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004349 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004350 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4351 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4352 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4353 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4354 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004355 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4357 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4358
4359 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4360 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4361 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4362 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004363
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004364- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004365 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4366 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4367 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4368 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4369 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4370 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4371 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4372 once it is created.
4373
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004374- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4375 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4376 (key, value) pairs.
4377
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004378- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004379 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4380 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4381
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004382- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4383 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4384 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4385 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4386 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004387
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004388- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004389 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4390 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4391
4392 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4393
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004394- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004395 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4396
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004397Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004399
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004400- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004401 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4402 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004403
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004404- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4405 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4406 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4407 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4408 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4409 in this area anymore).
4410
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004411- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4412 threading.Timer.
4413
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004414- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4415 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4416
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004417- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004418 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4419
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004420- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004421 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4422 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4423 converted to Python longs.
4424
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004425- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004426 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4427
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004428- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4429 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4430 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4431
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004432Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004434
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004435- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4436 division operators as per PEP 238.
4437
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004438Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004440
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004441- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4442 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4443 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4444 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4445
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004446C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004448
4449- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004450
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004451- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4452 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004453 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004454
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4456 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004457 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004459
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004460- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004461 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4462 module:
4463
4464 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004465
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004466 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4467 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004468
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004469 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4470 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004471
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004472 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4473
4474 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4475
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004476- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004477 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4478 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4479 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004480
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004481New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004483
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004484- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4485 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4486 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4487 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4488 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004489
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004490Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004491-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004492
4493Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004495
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004496- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4497 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4498 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4499 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004500 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4501 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4502 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4503 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4504 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004505
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004506- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004507 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4508
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004509
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004510What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4511===========================
4512
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4514
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004515Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004516-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004517
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004518- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4519 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4520
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004521- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4522 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4523 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004524
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004525- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4526 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4527 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4528 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004529
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004530- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004533
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004534Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004536
4537- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004538 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004539 the module docstring for details.
4540
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004541Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004542-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004543
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004544- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004545 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4546 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4547 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004548
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004549- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4550 Nick Mathewson.
4551
4552Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004553----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004554
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004555- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4556 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4557 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4558 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4559 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4560 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4561 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4562 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4563
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004564- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4565 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4566 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4567 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4568
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004569- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4570 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4571 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4572 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4573 come a long way).
4574
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004575- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4576 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4577 write filters for these warnings).
4578
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004579- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4580 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4581 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4582 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4583 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4584
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004585- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4586 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4587 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4588 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4589 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4590 older distribution.
4591
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004592Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004593-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004594
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004595- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4596 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004597 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004598
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004599- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4600 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4601 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4602
4603- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4604
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004605- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4606
4607- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4608
4609- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4610
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004612
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004613- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4614
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004615New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004617
4618C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004620
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004621- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4622 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4623 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4624 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4625 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4626 against buffer overruns.
4627
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004628- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004629 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4630 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004631 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4632 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4633 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4634
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004635- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4636 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4637 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4638 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4639 deprecated.
4640
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004641Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004642-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004643
4644- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4645 relevant is found.
4646
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004647
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004648What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004649===========================
4650
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4652
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004653Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004654----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004655
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004656- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4657 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4658 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4659 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4660 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4661 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4662 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4663 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004664 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004665 repaired.
4666
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004667- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004668 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004669 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4670 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4671 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4672 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4673 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4674 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4675 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4676 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4677
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004678- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4679 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4680 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4681 leading BMO character).
4682
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004683- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4684 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4685 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4686
4687 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4688 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4689 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004690
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004691 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4692 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4693 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4694 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4695 for various simple to use conversions.
4696
4697 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4698 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4699
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4701 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4702 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4703 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4704 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4705 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4706 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4707 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4708 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4709 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4710 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4711 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4712 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4713 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4714 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004715
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004716- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4717 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4718 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004719 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004720 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004721
4722 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004723 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4724 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4725 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4726 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4727 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004728 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4729 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004730
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004731 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4732 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4733 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004734 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004735
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004736- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4737 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4738 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4739 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4740 floating arithmetic,
4741
4742 x = 9007199254740992.0
4743 print long(x)
4744
4745 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4746 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4747 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4748 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4749 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4750 functions are of good quality).
4751
4752 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4753 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4754 algorithms to break.
4755
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004756- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4757 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4758 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4759 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4760 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4761 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4762 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4763 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4764 order.
4765
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004766- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4767 operation along the most common code paths.
4768
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004769- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4770 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4771
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004772- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4773 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4774 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4775 {}.update(UserDict())
4776
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004777- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4778 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4779 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4780 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4781 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4782 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4783 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4784 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4785
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004786- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004787 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004789 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004790 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4791 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004792 join() method of strings
4793 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004794 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4795 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004796 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004797 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004798
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004799- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4800 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4801
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004802- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4803 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4804
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004805- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4806 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4807 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4808 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4809
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004810- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4811 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004812 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004813 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4814 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004815
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004816- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4817
4818
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004819Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004821
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004822- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004823 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004824 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4825 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4826
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004827- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4828 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4829
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004830- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4831 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4832 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4833 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4834
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004835- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4836 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4837 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4838
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004839- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4840
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004841- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4842
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004843- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4844 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4845 that are still imported into string.py).
4846
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004847- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4848
4849- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4850 Now it does.
4851
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004852- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4853
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004854- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4855 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4856 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4857 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4858 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004859 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4860 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004861
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004862- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4863 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4864 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4865 'help(object)'.
4866
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004867Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004868-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004869
4870- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004871 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004872 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4873 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4874
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004875- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004876 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4877 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004878
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004879C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004880-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004881
4882- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4883 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884
4885----
4886
4887**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**