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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Georg Brandl533ff6f2006-03-08 18:09:27 +000015- Patch #1434038: property() now uses the getter's docstring if there is
16 no "doc" argument given. This makes it possible to legitimately use
17 property() as a decorator to produce a read-only property.
18
Guido van Rossum9aa37ab2006-03-07 18:54:08 +000019- PEP 357, patch 1436368: add an __index__ method to int/long and a matching
20 nb_index slot to the PyNumberMethods struct. The slot is consulted instead
21 of requiring an int or long in slicing and a few other contexts, enabling
22 other objects (e.g. Numeric Python's integers) to be used as slice indices.
23
Neal Norwitz995acdf2006-03-07 05:01:00 +000024- Fixed various bugs reported by Coverity's Prevent tool.
25
Brett Cannonbf364092006-03-01 04:25:17 +000026- PEP 352, patch #1104669: Make exceptions new-style objects. Introduced the
27 new exception base class, BaseException, which has a new message attribute.
28 KeyboardInterrupt and SystemExit to directly inherit from BaseException now.
29 Raising a string exception now raises a DeprecationWarning.
30
Thomas Woutersfb609f42006-02-28 16:37:25 +000031- Patch #1438387, PEP 328: relative and absolute imports. Imports can now be
32 explicitly relative, using 'from .module import name' to mean 'from the same
33 package as this module is in. Imports without dots still default to the
34 old relative-then-absolute, unless 'from __future__ import
35 absolute_import' is used.
36
Brett Cannona7446e32006-02-27 23:39:10 +000037- Properly check if 'warnings' raises an exception (usually when a filter set
38 to "error" is triggered) when raising a warning for raising string
39 exceptions.
40
Neal Norwitz0023a2f2006-02-27 23:24:48 +000041- CO_GENERATOR_ALLOWED is no longer defined, this behavior is the default.
42 The name was removed from Include/code.h.
43
Neal Norwitzeb651252006-02-27 16:47:12 +000044- PEP 308: conditional expressions were added (x if cond else y).
45
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +000046- Patch 1433928:
47 - The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
48 - dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
49 KeyError.
50
Tim Peters84ef21c2006-02-28 20:39:06 +000051- PEP 343: with statement implemented. Needs ``from __future__ import
52 with_statement``. Use of 'with' as a variable will generate a warning.
53 Use of 'as' as a variable will also generate a warning (unless it's
Neal Norwitz055ec242006-02-28 20:06:49 +000054 part of an import statement).
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +000055 The following objects have __context__ methods:
56 - The built-in file type.
57 - The thread.LockType type.
58 - The following types defined by the threading module:
59 Lock, RLock, Condition, Semaphore, BoundedSemaphore.
60 - The decimal.Context class.
Guido van Rossumc2e20742006-02-27 22:32:47 +000061
Marc-André Lemburgfe4b34c2006-02-19 15:22:22 +000062- Fix the encodings package codec search function to only search
63 inside its own package. Fixes problem reported in patch #1433198.
64
65 Note: Codec packages should implement and register their own
66 codec search function. PEP 100 has the details.
67
Martin v. Löwis18e16552006-02-15 17:27:45 +000068- PEP 353: Using ssize_t as the index type.
69
Neal Norwitzfc76d632006-01-10 06:03:13 +000070- Patch #1400181, fix unicode string formatting to not use the locale.
71 This is how string objects work. u'%f' could use , instead of .
72 for the decimal point. Now both strings and unicode always use periods.
73
Neal Norwitz671b9e32006-01-09 07:07:12 +000074- Bug #1244610, #1392915, fix build problem on OpenBSD 3.7 and 3.8.
75 configure would break checking curses.h.
76
Georg Brandlcd4d1e82005-12-27 17:37:07 +000077- Bug #959576: The pwd module is now builtin. This allows Python to be
78 built on UNIX platforms without $HOME set.
79
Neal Norwitzc10978f2005-12-19 06:07:16 +000080- Bug #1072182, fix some potential problems if characters are signed.
81
Neal Norwitz5d0ad502005-12-19 04:27:42 +000082- Bug #889500, fix line number on SyntaxWarning for global declarations.
83
Neal Norwitzdb83eb32005-12-18 05:29:30 +000084- Bug #1378022, UTF-8 files with a leading BOM crashed the interpreter.
85
Neal Norwitze7214a12005-12-18 05:03:17 +000086- Support for converting hex strings to floats no longer works.
87 This was not portable. float('0x3') now raises a ValueError.
88
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000089- Patch #1382163: Expose Subversion revision number to Python. New C API
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +000090 function Py_GetBuildNumber(). New attribute sys.subversion. Build number
Barry Warsaw2a38a862005-12-18 01:27:35 +000091 is now displayed in interactive prompt banner.
92
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000093- Implementation of PEP 341 - Unification of try/except and try/finally.
94 "except" clauses can now be written together with a "finally" clause in
Neal Norwitz11ca77e2005-12-17 22:24:12 +000095 one try statement instead of two nested ones. Patch #1355913.
Georg Brandlfa166682005-12-17 21:45:17 +000096
Hye-Shik Chang835b2432005-12-17 04:38:31 +000097- Bug #1379994: Builtin unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape codec
98 now encodes backslash correctly.
99
Martin v. Löwisb45b3152005-11-28 17:34:23 +0000100- Patch #1350409: Work around signal handling bug in Visual Studio 2005.
101
Georg Brandlf06e30a2005-11-24 15:37:42 +0000102- Bug #1281408: Py_BuildValue now works correct even with unsigned longs
103 and long longs.
104
Neal Norwitz67715f02005-11-09 06:59:35 +0000105- SF Bug #1350188, "setdlopenflags" leads to crash upon "import"
106 It was possible dlerror() returns a NULL pointer, use a default error
107 message in this case.
108
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000109- Replaced most Unicode charmap codecs with new ones using the
110 new Unicode translate string feature in the builtin charmap
111 codec; the codecs were created from the mapping tables available
112 at ftp.unicode.org and contain a few updates (e.g. the Mac OS
113 encodings now include a mapping for the Apple logo)
114
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000115- Added a few more codecs for Mac OS encodings
Marc-André Lemburga5bafc42005-10-23 13:43:40 +0000116
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000117- Speed up some Unicode operations.
118
Martin v. Löwisbd260da2006-02-26 19:42:26 +0000119- A new AST parser implementation was completed. The abstract
120 syntax tree is available for read-only (non-compile) access
Martin v. Löwis577b5b92006-02-27 15:23:19 +0000121 to Python code; an _ast module was added.
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000122
Neal Norwitzb6570f52005-10-21 06:26:10 +0000123- SF bug #1167751: fix incorrect code being for generator expressions.
Neal Norwitz16af7342005-10-21 06:25:33 +0000124 The following code now raises a SyntaxError: foo(a = i for i in range(10))
125
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +0000126- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
127
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +0000128- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
129 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
130
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +0000131- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
132
133- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
134
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +0000135- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
136 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
137 was empty.
138
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +0000139- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
140 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
141
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000142- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
Walter Dörwald6611a8b2005-10-09 19:28:35 +0000143 present).
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +0000144
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +0000145- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
146 codes.
147
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +0000148- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
149 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
150 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
151
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +0000152- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
153 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
154
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +0000155- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +0000156 (fixes bug #1119418).
157
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +0000158- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
159
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +0000160- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
161 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
162
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +0000163- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
164 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
165 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
166
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +0000167- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
168
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +0000169- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
170 reference counts in some error exit cases.
171
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000172- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
173 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
174 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
175 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
176 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
177 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
178 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
179 realloc.
180
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +0000181- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
182 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
183
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +0000184- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
185 like their int counterparts.
186
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +0000187- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
188 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
189 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
190 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
191 for a longer write-up of the problem).
192
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +0000193- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
194 serializing floats.
195
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +0000196- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
197 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
198 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
199
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +0000200- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
201 278.
202
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000203- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
204 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
205 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
206 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000207 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +0000208 PyNumber_*().
209 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
210
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000211- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
212 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
213 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
214 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
215
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000216- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
217 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
218 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
219 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
220 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
221
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000222- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
223 disabled caused a crash.
224
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000225- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
226 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
227
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000228- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000229 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
230
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000231- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
232
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000233- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000234 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
235 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
236 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000237
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000238- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
239
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000240- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
241 returning None.
242
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000243- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000244 ('\') with a specific error message.
245
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000246- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
247
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000248- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
249 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
250
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000251- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000252 an ferror() call.
253
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000254- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
255 list.sort().
256
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000257- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
258 (2+3) --> (5).
259
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000260- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
261
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000262- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
263 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000264
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000265- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
266 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
267 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
268
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000269- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
270 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
271 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
272
Tim Petersf4e69282006-02-27 17:15:31 +0000273- Patch #1413181: changed ``PyThreadState_Delete()`` to forget about the
274 current thread state when the auto-GIL-state machinery knows about
275 it (since the thread state is being deleted, continuing to remember it
276 can't help, but can hurt if another thread happens to get created with
277 the same thread id).
278
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000279Extension Modules
280-----------------
281
Neal Norwitzb62c4332006-03-04 18:35:47 +0000282- The timing module is no longer built by default. It was deprecated
283 in PEP 4 in Python 2.0 or earlier.
284
Guido van Rossum1968ad32006-02-25 22:38:04 +0000285- Patch 1433928: Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
286 This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
287
Georg Brandldbd83392006-02-20 09:42:33 +0000288- Bug #854823: socketmodule now builds on Sun platforms even when
289 INET_ADDRSTRLEN is not defined.
290
Georg Brandlf4f44152006-02-18 22:29:33 +0000291- Patch #1393157: os.startfile() now has an optional argument to specify
292 a "command verb" to invoke on the file.
293
Neal Norwitz082b2df2006-02-07 07:04:46 +0000294- Bug #876637, prevent stack corruption when socket descriptor
295 is larger than FD_SETSIZE.
296
Neal Norwitz0e6bc8c2006-02-05 05:45:43 +0000297- Patch #1407135, bug #1424041: harmonize mmap behavior of anonymous memory.
298 mmap.mmap(-1, size) now returns anonymous memory in both Unix and Windows.
299 mmap.mmap(0, size) should not be used on Windows for anonymous memory.
300
Martin v. Löwis57a34e82006-02-04 19:12:37 +0000301- Patch #1422385: The nis module now supports access to domains other
302 than the system default domain.
303
Martin v. Löwis14694662006-02-03 12:54:16 +0000304- Use Win32 API to implement os.stat/fstat. As a result, subsecond timestamps
305 are reported, the limit on path name lengths is removed, and stat reports
306 WindowsError now (instead of OSError).
307
Gregory P. Smithcfc4a8d2006-01-29 19:46:23 +0000308- Add bsddb.db.DBEnv.set_tx_timestamp allowing time based database recovery.
309
Neal Norwitz62a21122006-01-25 05:21:55 +0000310- Bug #1413192, fix seg fault in bsddb if a transaction was deleted
311 before the env.
312
Martin v. Löwis11017b12006-01-14 18:12:57 +0000313- Patch #1103116: Basic AF_NETLINK support.
314
Neal Norwitz3b4fff82006-01-11 08:54:45 +0000315- Bug #1402308, (possible) segfault when using mmap.mmap(-1, ...)
316
Neal Norwitz88bbd732006-01-10 07:05:44 +0000317- Bug #1400822, _curses over{lay,write} doesn't work when passing 6 ints.
318 Also fix ungetmouse() which did not accept arguments properly.
319 The code now conforms to the documented signature.
320
Neal Norwitz5e3d8622006-01-09 06:24:35 +0000321- Bug #1400115, Fix segfault when calling curses.panel.userptr()
322 without prior setting of the userptr.
323
Neal Norwitz40c6b472006-01-05 05:43:35 +0000324- Fix 64-bit problems in bsddb.
325
Neal Norwitz8856fb72005-12-18 03:34:22 +0000326- Patch #1365916: fix some unsafe 64-bit mmap methods.
327
Hye-Shik Changc5c57e62005-12-12 11:48:32 +0000328- Bug #1290333: Added a workaround for cjkcodecs' _codecs_cn build
329 problem on AIX.
330
Georg Brandla13c2442005-11-22 19:30:31 +0000331- Bug #869197: os.setgroups rejects long integer arguments
332
Neal Norwitz0f46bbf2005-11-03 05:00:25 +0000333- Bug #1346533, select.poll() doesn't raise an error if timeout > sys.maxint
334
Neal Norwitz7b631792005-11-02 05:26:07 +0000335- Bug #1344508, Fix UNIX mmap leaking file descriptors
336
Neal Norwitzf3396542005-10-28 05:52:22 +0000337- Patch #1338314, Bug #1336623: fix tarfile so it can extract
338 REGTYPE directories from tarfiles written by old programs.
339
Gregory P. Smithe101df92006-01-24 20:09:45 +0000340- Patch #1407992, fixes broken bsddb module db associate when using
341 BerkeleyDB 3.3, 4.0 or 4.1.
342
343- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 4.4
344
345- Get bsddb module to build with BerkeleyDB version 3.2
Neal Norwitzfed9b3e2005-10-21 06:32:02 +0000346
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000347- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
348 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
349
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000350- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
351
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000352- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
353 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
354
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000355- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
356 returns in cStringIO.c.
357
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000358- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
359 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
360
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000361- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
362
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000363- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
364
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000365- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
366 the file system encoding.
367
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000368- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
369 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000370
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000371- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
372
373- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000374 line without newlines.
375
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000376- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
377 on Windows.
378
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000379- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000380 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
381
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000382- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
383 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
384 for large or negative values.
385
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000386- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000387 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000388
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000389- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
390
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000391- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
392 if available on the platform.
393
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000394- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
395 available on the platform.
396
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000397- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
398 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
399
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000400- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
401
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000402- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
403 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
404 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
405
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000406- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
407
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000408- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
409 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
410
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000411- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000412 file size.
413
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000414- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
415
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000416- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
417 {remove_history,replace_history}
418
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000419- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
420 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000421
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000422- stat_float_times is now True.
423
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000424- array.array objects are now picklable.
425
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000426- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
427 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
428
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000429- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
430 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
431 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
432
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000433- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
434 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000435
436Library
437-------
438
Barry Warsawd3c38ff2006-03-07 09:46:03 +0000439- The function get_count() has been added to the gc module, and gc.collect()
440 grew an optional 'generation' argument.
441
Martin v. Löwisfbab90e2006-03-05 13:36:04 +0000442- A library msilib to generate Windows Installer files, and a distutils
443 command bdist_msi have been added.
444
Guido van Rossum1a5e21e2006-02-28 21:57:43 +0000445- PEP 343: new module contextlib.py defines decorator @contextmanager
446 and helpful context managers nested() and closing().
447
Martin v. Löwis415ed932006-02-27 19:56:30 +0000448- The compiler package now supports future imports after the module docstring.
449
Georg Brandl8f7c54e2006-02-20 08:40:38 +0000450- Bug #1413790: zipfile now sanitizes absolute archive names that are
451 not allowed by the specs.
452
Georg Brandlc98eeed2006-02-19 14:57:47 +0000453- Patch #1215184: FileInput now can be given an opening hook which can
454 be used to control how files are opened.
455
Georg Brandlc029f872006-02-19 14:12:34 +0000456- Patch #1212287: fileinput.input() now has a mode parameter for
457 specifying the file mode input files should be opened with.
458
Georg Brandl67e9fb92006-02-19 13:56:17 +0000459- Patch #1215184: fileinput now has a fileno() function for getting the
460 current file number.
461
Georg Brandl602b9ba2006-02-19 13:26:36 +0000462- Patch #1349274: gettext.install() now optionally installs additional
463 translation functions other than _() in the builtin namespace.
464
Georg Brandle4662172006-02-19 09:51:27 +0000465- Patch #1337756: fileinput now accepts Unicode filenames.
466
Georg Brandl7b4e7c22006-02-18 21:10:56 +0000467- Patch #1373643: The chunk module can now read chunks larger than
468 two gigabytes.
469
Georg Brandl21dd1af2006-02-17 13:35:13 +0000470- Patch #1417555: SimpleHTTPServer now returns Last-Modified headers.
471
Georg Brandlbd3bc4d2006-02-17 09:52:53 +0000472- Bug #1430298: It is now possible to send a mail with an empty
473 return address using smtplib.
474
Georg Brandl0e1abe22006-02-17 09:48:14 +0000475- Bug #1432260: The names of lambda functions are now properly displayed
476 in pydoc.
Georg Brandl501dd0d2006-02-17 09:45:40 +0000477
Martin v. Löwis00756902006-02-05 17:09:41 +0000478- Patch #1412872: zipfile now sets the creator system to 3 (Unix)
479 unless the system is Win32.
480
Tim Petersda1329b2006-02-27 16:50:01 +0000481- Patch #1349118: urllib now supports user:pass@ style proxy
Martin v. Löwis3e865952006-01-24 15:51:21 +0000482 specifications, raises IOErrors when proxies for unsupported protocols
483 are defined, and uses the https proxy on https redirections.
484
Georg Brandl531ceba2006-01-21 07:20:56 +0000485- Bug #902075: urllib2 now supports 'host:port' style proxy specifications.
486
487- Bug #1407902: Add support for sftp:// URIs to urlparse.
Georg Brandl89f35ac2006-01-20 17:24:23 +0000488
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000489- Bug #1371247: Update Windows locale identifiers in locale.py.
490
Neal Norwitzf60cd472006-01-14 07:05:13 +0000491- Bug #1394565: SimpleHTTPServer now doesn't choke on query parameters
Georg Brandl45ab2332006-01-13 17:05:56 +0000492 any more.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000493
Georg Brandl4edd9892006-01-13 16:59:46 +0000494- Bug #1403410: The warnings module now doesn't get confused
495 when it can't find out the module name it generates a warning for.
Georg Brandlb709c2c2006-01-20 09:07:35 +0000496
Martin v. Löwis412ed3b2006-01-08 10:45:39 +0000497- Patch #1177307: Added a new codec utf_8_sig for UTF-8 with a BOM signature.
498
Neal Norwitzab86f8e2005-12-23 21:44:36 +0000499- Patch #1157027: cookielib mishandles RFC 2109 cookies in Netscape mode
500
Neal Norwitz338e7862005-12-23 21:27:46 +0000501- Patch #1117398: cookielib.LWPCookieJar and .MozillaCookieJar now raise
502 LoadError as documented, instead of IOError. For compatibility,
503 LoadError subclasses IOError.
504
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000505- Added the hashlib module. It provides secure hash functions for MD5 and
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000506 SHA1, 224, 256, 384, and 512. Note that recent developments make the
507 historic MD5 and SHA1 unsuitable for cryptographic-strength applications.
508 In <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-December/058850.html>
509 Ronald L. Rivest offered this advice for Python:
510
511 "The consensus of researchers in this area (at least as
512 expressed at the NIST Hash Function Workshop 10/31/05),
513 is that SHA-256 is a good choice for the time being, but
514 that research should continue, and other alternatives may
515 arise from this research. The larger SHA's also seem OK."
Brett Cannon3cbd0382005-12-16 22:49:23 +0000516
Fredrik Lundh7e0aef02005-12-12 18:54:55 +0000517- Added a subset of Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree package. Available
518 modules are xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.etree.ElementPath, and
519 xml.etree.ElementInclude, from ElementTree 1.2.6.
520
Martin v. Löwis307021f2005-11-27 16:59:04 +0000521- Patch #1162825: Support non-ASCII characters in IDLE window titles.
522
Georg Brandl1f663572005-11-26 16:50:44 +0000523- Bug #1365984: urllib now opens "data:" URLs again.
524
Brett Cannonad07ff22005-11-23 02:15:50 +0000525- Patch #1314396: prevent deadlock for threading.Thread.join() when an exception
526 is raised within the method itself on a previous call (e.g., passing in an
527 illegal argument)
528
Brett Cannon5d0bf942005-11-02 23:04:26 +0000529- Bug #1340337: change time.strptime() to always return ValueError when there
530 is an error in the format string.
531
Georg Brandle8f24432005-10-03 14:16:44 +0000532- Patch #754022: Greatly enhanced webbrowser.py (by Oleg Broytmann).
533
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000534- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000535 "parent" argument.
536
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000537- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
538 for padding.
539
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000540- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
541 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
542
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000543- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
544 to get the correct encoding.
545
546- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
547 languages.
548
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000549- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
550
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000551- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
552
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000553- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
554
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000555- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
556 functionality.
557
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000558- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
559
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000560- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
561 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
562
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000563- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
564 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
565 match the Content-Length header.
566
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000567- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
568
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000569- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
570 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
Walter Dörwalda05834e2005-10-09 19:38:21 +0000571 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000572
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000573- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
574
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000575- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
576
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000577- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
578 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
579
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000580- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
581 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
582 Tkdnd.
583
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000584- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
585 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
586
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000587- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
588 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
589
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000590- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000591 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
592
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000593- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
594 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
595
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000596- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
597 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
598
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000599- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000600 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000601
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000602- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
603
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000604- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
605 error messages.
606
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000607- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
608
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000609- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
610 Bug #1224621.
611
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000612- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
613 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
614 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
615 terminates by raising StopIteration.
616
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000617- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
618
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000619- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
620 component of the path.
621
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000622- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
623 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
624 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
625 class at all.
626
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000627- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
628 files to PyPI.
629
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000630- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
631 them to PyPI.
632
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000633- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
634 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
635 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
636 work as expected.
637
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000638- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
639 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
640
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000641- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000642 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
643
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000644- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
645
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000646- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
647 to build.
648
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000649- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
650 symbolic links on Windows.
651
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000652- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000653 profile.py if available.
654
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000655- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
656
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000657- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
658 in LWPCookieJar.
659
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000660- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
661
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000662- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
663
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000664- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
665
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000666- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
667
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000668- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
669
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000670- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
671
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000672- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
673
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000674- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
675
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000676- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
677 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
678 be exploited in various ways.
679
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000680- Bug #1222790: in SimpleXMLRPCServer, set the reuse-address and close-on-exec
Andrew M. Kuchling3a976052005-12-04 15:07:41 +0000681 flags on the HTTP listening socket.
682
Andrew M. Kuchlinge63fde72005-12-04 15:36:57 +0000683- Bug #792570: SimpleXMLRPCServer had problems if the request grew too large.
684 Fixed by reading the HTTP body in chunks instead of one big socket.read().
685
Tim Peterse3547fd2005-12-16 23:13:57 +0000686- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding arguments to constructors of
Andrew M. Kuchling10a16de2005-12-04 16:34:40 +0000687 SimpleXMLRPCServer and CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.
688
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000689- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
690
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000691- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
692
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000693- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
694
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000695- Enhancements to the csv module:
696
697 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000698 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000699 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000700 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
701 reporting.
702 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
703 dictates.
704 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000705 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000706 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000707 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
708 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000709 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
710 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000711 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000712 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
713 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
714 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
715 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
716 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
717 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
718 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
719 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
720 without first creating a dialect class.
721 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
722 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
723 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000724 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000725 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
726 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000727 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
728 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
729 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
730 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000731 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
732 This has been fixed.
733
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000734- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
735 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
736 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
737 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
738
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000739- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
740
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000741- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
742 (Bug #951915).
743
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000744- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
745 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
746 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000747 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000748
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000749- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
750
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000751- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
752 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
753
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000754- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
755
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000756- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
757
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000758- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
759
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000760- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
761
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000762- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
763
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000764- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
765 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
766 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
767
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000768- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000769 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000770
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000771- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
772 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
773 tokenizer with very long source lines.
774
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000775- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called
776 immediately after creating the object, without any intervening
777 ``.decompress()`` calls.
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000778
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000779- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
780 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000781
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000782- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
783 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
784
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000785- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
786 correctly.
787
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000788- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
789 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
790 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
791 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
792 between two lines.
793
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000794- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
795 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
796 handlers.
797
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000798- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000799 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
800 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000801
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000802- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
803 considering it exactly like a '*'.
804
Walter Dörwald007f8df2005-10-09 19:42:27 +0000805- Bug #1245379: Add "unicode-1-1-utf-7" as an alias for "utf-7" to
806 ``encodings.aliases``.
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000807
Walter Dörwald09f0dd52005-11-21 19:10:07 +0000808- ` uu.encode()`` and ``uu.decode()`` now support unicode filenames.
809
Gustavo Niemeyer548148812006-01-31 18:34:13 +0000810- Patch #1413711: Certain patterns of differences were making difflib
811 touch the recursion limit.
812
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000813Build
814-----
815
Martin v. Löwis86d66262006-02-17 08:40:11 +0000816- Patch #1432345: Make python compile on DragonFly.
817
Martin v. Löwis856bf9a2006-02-14 20:42:55 +0000818- Build support for Win64-AMD64 was added.
819
Martin v. Löwisa55e55e2006-02-11 15:55:14 +0000820- Patch #1428494: Prefer linking against ncursesw over ncurses library.
821
Martin v. Löwisfd9a72a2006-01-08 10:07:33 +0000822- Patch #881820: look for openpty and forkpty also in libbsd.
823
Martin v. Löwis64c33dd2006-01-03 07:42:14 +0000824- The sources of zlib are now part of the Python distribution (zlib 1.2.3).
825 The zlib module is now builtin on Windows.
826
Martin v. Löwisd5845ec2005-12-30 12:31:38 +0000827- Use -xcode=pic32 for CCSHARED on Solaris with SunPro.
828
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000829- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
830 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
831
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000832- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
833 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
834
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000835- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
836 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
837 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000838 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000839
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000840- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
841 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
842 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
843
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000844- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
845
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000846- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
847 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
848
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000849- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
850 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
851 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
852 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
853 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
854 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
855 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
856 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
857
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000858- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
859 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
860 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
861 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
862
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000863C API
864-----
865
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000866- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
867
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000868- Removed PyRange_New().
869
Walter Dörwaldd1c1e102005-10-06 20:29:57 +0000870- Patch #1313939: PyUnicode_DecodeCharmap() accepts a unicode string as the
871 mapping argument now. This string is used as a mapping table. Byte values
872 greater than the length of the string and 0xFFFE are treated as undefined
873 mappings.
874
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000875
876Tests
877-----
878
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000879- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000880
Hye-Shik Changaaa2f1d2005-12-10 17:44:27 +0000881- Patch #1276356: New resource "urlfetch" is implemented. This enables
882 even impatient people to run tests that require remote files.
883
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000884
885Documentation
886-------------
887
Georg Brandl8cb30772006-01-20 09:34:29 +0000888- Bug #1402224: Add warning to dl docs about crashes.
889
Georg Brandla3a93ae2006-01-20 09:14:36 +0000890- Bug #1396471: Document that Windows' ftell() can return invalid
891 values for text files with UNIX-style line endings.
892
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000893- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
894
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000895- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
896
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000897- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
898
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000899- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
900
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000901- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
902
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000903- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
904
905- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
906
907- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
908
909- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
910
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000911- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
912 Closes bug #1166582.
913
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000914- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
915 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
916 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
917
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000918Mac
919---
920
921
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000922New platforms
923-------------
924
925- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
926
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000927
928Tools/Demos
929-----------
930
Brett Cannonacde7342006-03-01 04:28:00 +0000931- Created Misc/Vim/vim_syntax.py to auto-generate a python.vim file in that
932 directory for syntax highlighting in Vim. Vim directory was added and placed
933 vimrc to it (was previous up a level).
934
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000935- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
936 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
937 source files that need an encoding declaration.
938 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
939
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000940- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
941
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000942- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000943
Barry Warsaw538561e2006-01-01 21:48:54 +0000944- Fixed a display glitch in Pynche, which could cause the right arrow to
945 wiggle over by a pixel.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000946
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000947What's New in Python 2.4 final?
948===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000949
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000950*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000951
952Core and builtins
953-----------------
954
955- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
956 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
957 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
958
959
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000960What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
961==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000962
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000963*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000964
965Core and builtins
966-----------------
967
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000968- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
969 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
970 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
971
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000972
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000973Library
974-------
975
976- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
977 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
978 raised is re-raised.
979
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000980- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
981 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
982
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000983- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
984 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
985 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
986 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
987 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
988 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
989 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
990 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
991 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
992 by the slice are recomputed now.
993
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000994- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000995
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000996Build
997-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000998
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000999- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
1000 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
1001 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001002
1003C API
1004-----
1005
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +00001006- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
1007
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00001008
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001009What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
1010================================
1011
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +00001012*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001013
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001014License
1015-------
1016
1017The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
1018is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
1019changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
1020Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
1021intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
1022durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
1023the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
1024License::
1025
1026 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
1027
1028says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
1029to Python 2.1.1.
1030
1031The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
1032License Version 2.
1033
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001034Core and builtins
1035-----------------
1036
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001037- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
1038 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
1039 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
1040 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
1041 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
1042 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
1043 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
Andrew M. Kuchlingb2a739d2005-11-22 15:14:44 +00001044 ``AttributeError`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +00001045 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
1046 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
1047
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +00001048- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001049
1050Extension Modules
1051-----------------
1052
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +00001053- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
1054 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
1055 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
1056 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001057
1058Library
1059-------
1060
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +00001061- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
1062 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
1063 returned.
1064
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +00001065- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
1066
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +00001067- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
1068 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
1069
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +00001070- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
1071
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +00001072- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
1073 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001074
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +00001075- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
1076
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +00001077- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
1078
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001079- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +00001080 the source code is updated and reloaded.
1081
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001082Build
1083-----
1084
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +00001085- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00001086
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001087What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
1088================================
1089
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +00001090*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001091
1092Core and builtins
1093-----------------
1094
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001095- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +00001096 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
1097
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +00001098- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
1099 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
1100 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
1101 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
1102
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001103- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
1104 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
1105
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +00001106- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
1107 constant.
1108
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001109- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
1110 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
1111 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
1112 large), and to anomalies such as
1113 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
1114 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
1115 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
1116 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001117
1118Extension modules
1119-----------------
1120
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +00001121- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
1122 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +00001123 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
1124 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
1125 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001126
1127Library
1128-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001129
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001130- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +00001131 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +00001132 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
1133 --swig-cpp.
1134
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +00001135- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
1136 it is set.
1137
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +00001138- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +00001139
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +00001140- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
1141 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
1142 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
1143 Closes bug #1039270.
1144
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001145- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +00001146
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +00001147 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +00001148 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
1149 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
1150 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
1151 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
1152 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
1153 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
1154 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
1155 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
1156 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
1157 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
1158 + Updates to documentation.
1159
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +00001160- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
1161 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
1162 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
1163 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
1164
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +00001165- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001166
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +00001167- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
1168 applications should use the getmember function.
1169
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +00001170- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
1171
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +00001172- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
1173 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
1174 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
1175 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
1176 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
1177 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
1178 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
1179 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
1180 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
1181
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001182- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
1183 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +00001184 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001185
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001186- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
1187 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
1188 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
1189 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
1190 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
1191 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
1192 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
1193 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001194
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001195- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
1196 the new public features (of which there are many).
1197
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +00001198- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001199 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
1200 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
1201 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
1202 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +00001203 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001204
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +00001205- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
1206
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +00001207- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
1208 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
1209 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
1210 options.
1211
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +00001212- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
1213 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
1214 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
1215 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
1216 conditions under which non-string values work.
1217
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001218Build
1219-----
1220
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +00001221- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
1222 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
1223 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
1224
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +00001225- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
1226 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
1227 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
1228 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
1229 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001230
1231C API
1232-----
1233
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +00001234- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
1235 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
1236
1237- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
1238
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +00001239- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1240 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
1241 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
1242 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
1243 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
1244 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
1245 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
1246 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
1247 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
1248
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +00001249- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
1250
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +00001251- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
1252 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
1253 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001254
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001255Tests
1256-----
1257
1258- test__locale ported to unittest
1259
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001260Mac
1261---
1262
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +00001263- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
1264 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
1265 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001266
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001267Tools/Demos
1268-----------
1269
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +00001270- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
1271 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
1272 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
1273 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
1274 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00001275
1276
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001277What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
1278=================================
1279
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +00001280*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001281
1282Core and builtins
1283-----------------
1284
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001285- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001286 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
1287
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001288- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
1289 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
1290 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
1291 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
1292 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
1293 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
1294 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
1295 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001296 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
1297 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
1298 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
1299 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
1300 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +00001301
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +00001302- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
1303 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
1304 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
1305 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
1306 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
1307
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +00001308- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
1309
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +00001310- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
1311 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
1312
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +00001313- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
1314 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
1315 modified the list.
1316
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +00001317- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
1318 functions is now writable.
1319
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +00001320- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
1321 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
1322 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
1323 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
1324
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001325- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1326 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1327 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1328 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1329 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001330
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001331- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1332 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1333
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001334Extension modules
1335-----------------
1336
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001337- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1338
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001339- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1340 data.
1341
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001342- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1343 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1344 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1345 supposed to have been truncated away.
1346
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001347- Added socket.socketpair().
1348
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001349- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1350 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1351
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001352- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001353 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1354
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001355Library
1356-------
1357
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001358- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001359 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001360
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001361- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1362 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1363
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001364- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1365 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1366
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001367- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1368
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001369- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1370 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001371
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001372- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1373 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1374
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001375- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1376
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001377- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1378
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001379- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1380
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001381- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1382 Percivall.
1383
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001384- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1385 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1386
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001387- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1388 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1389 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001390 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001391
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001392- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1393 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1394 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1395 and exponent.
1396
1397- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1398
1399- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001400 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001401 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1402
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001403- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1404 to the readline module.
1405
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001406- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001407 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1408 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001409
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001410- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1411 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1412 contains symlinks.
1413
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001414- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1415 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1416
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001417- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1418 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1419 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1420
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001421- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1422 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1423 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1424 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1425 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1426 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1427 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1428 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1429 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1430 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1431 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1432 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1433 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1434
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001435- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1436
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001437Tools/Demos
1438-----------
1439
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001440- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1441 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1442
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001443- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1444
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001445Build
1446-----
1447
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001448- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1449 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1450 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1451 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1452 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1453 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1454 plans to do so.
1455
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001456- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1457 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1458
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001459- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1460 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1461
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001462- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1463 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1464
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001465- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1466 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1467
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001468- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1469 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1470
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001471C API
1472-----
1473
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001474..
1475
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001476Documentation
1477-------------
1478
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001479- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1480 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1481
1482- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1483 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1484 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001485
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001486New platforms
1487-------------
1488
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001489- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1490
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001491Tests
1492-----
1493
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001494..
1495
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001496Windows
1497-------
1498
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001499- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1500 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1501 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1502 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1503 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1504 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1505 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1506 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1507 the problem.
1508
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001509Mac
1510---
1511
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001512..
1513
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001514
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001515What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1516=================================
1517
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001518*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001519
1520Core and builtins
1521-----------------
1522
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001523- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1524 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1525 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1526 sensitive code.
1527
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001528- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001529 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001530
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001531 @staticmethod
1532 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001533
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001534 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001535
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001536- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1537 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1538 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1539 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1540 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1541 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1542 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1543 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1544 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1545 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1546 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1547
1548 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1549 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1550 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1551 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1552 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1553 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1554 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1555
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001556- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1557 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1558
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001559- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001560 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001561
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001562- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001563 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001564 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1565
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001566- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001567 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1568 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1569
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001570- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1571 types that support garbage collection.
1572
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001573- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1574
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001575- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1576 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1577 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1578 Jython.
1579
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001580- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1581
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001582- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1583 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1584
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001585- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1586 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1587 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001588
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001589- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1590 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1591 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1592
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001593Extension modules
1594-----------------
1595
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001596- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1597
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001598Library
1599-------
1600
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001601- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1602 TIS-620
1603
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001604- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1605 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1606 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1607 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1608 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1609 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1610 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1611 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1612 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1613 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1614
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001615- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1616
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001617- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1618 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1619 same as when the argument is omitted).
1620 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1621
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001622- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1623
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001624- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1625 schemes are offered.
1626
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001627- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1628
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001629- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1630 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1631 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1632
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001633- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1634
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001635- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1636 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1637
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001638- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1639 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1640 when dummy_threading is being used.
1641
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001642- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1643 from a tarfile.
1644
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001645- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001646 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001647
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001648- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1649 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1650 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1651 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1652
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001653- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1654 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1655
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001656- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1657 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1658 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1659 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1660 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1661 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1662 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1663 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1664 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1665 by some other method in progress).
1666
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001667- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1668 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1669 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001670
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001671- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1672
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001673- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1674 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1675 AM Kuchling.
1676
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001677- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1678 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1679 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1680
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001681- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1682 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1683 instead of unsigned.
1684
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001685- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001686 no longer part of the public API.
1687
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001688- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1689 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1690 string methods of the same name).
1691
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001692- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001693 SF patch 945642.
1694
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001695- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1696
1697 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1698
1699 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1700 DocTestSuites.
1701
1702- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1703 that provide thread-local data.
1704
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001705- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1706 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1707
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001708- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1709
1710- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1711 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1712 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1713
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001714- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1715
1716 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1717 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1718 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001719
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001720 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1721 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1722 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1723 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1724
1725 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1726 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1727
1728 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1729 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1730 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1731 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1732
1733 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1734 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1735 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1736 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1737 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1738
1739 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1740 wrapping help output.
1741
1742 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1743 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1744 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001745
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001746C API
1747-----
1748
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001749- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1750 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1751 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1752 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1753 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1754 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1755 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1756 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1757 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1758 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1759 its visible semantics have not changed.
1760
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001761- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1762 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1763
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001764Documentation
1765-------------
1766
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001767- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001768
1769 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001770 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001771
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001772 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001773
1774 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1775
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001776- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001777
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001778Tests
1779-----
1780
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001781- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001782 platforms that use the Makefile.
1783
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001784- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1785 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1786 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1787
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001788
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001789What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1790=================================
1791
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001792*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001793
1794Core and builtins
1795-----------------
1796
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001797- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1798 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1799 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1800 objects now (one object instead of three).
1801
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001802- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1803 Windows DLLs.
1804
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001805- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1806 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001807
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001808- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1809 a new .pyc magic.
1810
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001811- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1812 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1813 be there.
1814
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001815- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1816 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1817 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1818
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001819- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1820 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1821 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1822
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001823- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1824
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001825- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1826 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1827 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001828
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001829- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1830 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1831
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001832- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1833
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001834- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001835 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001836
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001837- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1838
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001839- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1840
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001841- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1842 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1843
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001844- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1845 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1846 Fixes bug #858016 .
1847
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001848- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1849 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1850 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1851
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001852- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1853 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1854 improves their performance (about 35%).
1855
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001856- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1857 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1858 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1859
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001860- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1861 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1862 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1863 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1864
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001865- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1866 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001867 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001868 length is not known).
1869
1870- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1871 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001872 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1873 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001874 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1875
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001876- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1877 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1878
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001879- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1880 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1881 keyword arguments.
1882
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001883- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1884 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1885 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1886
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001887- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1888 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1889 cases.
1890
1891- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1892 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1893 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1894 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1895 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1896 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1897 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1898 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1899 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1900 a release build.
1901
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001902- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1903 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1904
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001905- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001906 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001907
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001908- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1909 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1910 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1911 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1912 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1913 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1914 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1915 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1916 destroyed.
1917
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001918- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1919 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1920 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1921 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1922 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1923 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1924 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1925 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1926
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001927- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1928 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1929 character other than a space.
1930
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001931- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1932 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1933 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1934 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1935 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1936 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1937 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1938 attributes with the same name.
1939
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001940- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1941 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1942 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1943 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1944 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1945 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1946 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1947 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1948 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1949 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1950 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1951 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1952 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1953 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001954
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001955- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1956 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1957 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1958 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1959 This has been repaired.
1960
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001961- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1962
1963- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1964
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001965- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1966 over a sequence.
1967
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001968- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001969 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001970
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001971- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1972
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001973- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1974 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1975 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1976 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1977 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1978 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1979 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1980 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1981
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001982- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1983 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1984 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1985
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001986- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1987 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1988 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1989 freelist.
1990
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001991- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1992 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1993
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001994- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1995 number.
1996
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001997- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1998 a TypeError exception.
1999
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00002000- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
2001 820195.
2002
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00002003- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
2004 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
2005 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
2006
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002007- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00002008 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
2009 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00002010
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00002011- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
2012 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
2013 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
2014
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002015- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
2016 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002017 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002018
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002019- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00002020 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
2021 the first call.
2022
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00002023
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002024Extension modules
2025-----------------
2026
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00002027- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
2028 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
2029
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002030- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
2031 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
2032 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
2033 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
2034 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
2035 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
2036 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00002037
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00002038- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
2039
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00002040- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
2041
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00002042- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
2043 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
2044
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00002045- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
2046 fewer false positives.
2047
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00002048- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
2049 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
2050
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002051- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00002052 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
2053
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00002054- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002055 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00002056 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00002057 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
2058 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00002059
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00002060- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
2061 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
2062 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
2063 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
2064
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00002065- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
2066 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
2067 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
2068 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
2069 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
2070 #897625.
2071
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00002072- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
2073 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
2074
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00002075- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
2076 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
2077 and pops on either side of the deque.
2078
2079- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
2080 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
2081
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00002082- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
2083 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
2084 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
2085 other functions that expect a function argument.
2086
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00002087- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
2088
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002089- os.getsid was added.
2090
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00002091- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
2092 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
2093 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
2094
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00002095- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
2096
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00002097- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
2098
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00002099- readline.clear_history was added.
2100
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00002101- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
2102
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00002103- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
2104
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00002105- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
2106
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00002107- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
2108
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00002109- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
2110
2111- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
2112
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00002113- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
2114
2115- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
2116
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002117- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
2118 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
2119 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
2120
2121- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
2122 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
2123 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
2124 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
2125 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
2126 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
2127 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
2128
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00002129- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
2130 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
2131 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
2132 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002133
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002134- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00002135 iterators from a single iterable.
2136
2137- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
2138 of raising a TypeError exception.
2139
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00002140- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
2141 as parameter.
2142
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002143Library
2144-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00002145
Armin Rigoa871ef22006-02-08 12:53:56 +00002146- Added a new module: cProfile, a C profiler with the same interface as the
2147 profile module. cProfile avoids some of the drawbacks of the hotshot
2148 profiler and provides a bit more information than the other two profilers.
2149 Based on "lsprof" (patch #1212837).
2150
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00002151- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
2152
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00002153- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
2154 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
2155 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002156
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00002157- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
2158 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
2159 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00002160
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00002161- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00002162
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00002163- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
2164 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00002165
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00002166- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
2167 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
2168
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002169- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
2170
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002171- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00002172 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00002173
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002174- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00002175 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002176
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00002177- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
2178
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00002179- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
2180 on cygwin and mingw32.
2181
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00002182- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
2183
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00002184- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
2185 module.
2186
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00002187- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
2188 installation scheme for all platforms.
2189
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002190- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00002191 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00002192
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00002193- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
2194 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
2195 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
2196
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00002197- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
2198 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
2199 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
2200
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00002201- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
2202
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00002203- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
2204
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00002205- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
2206 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
2207
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00002208- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
2209 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
2210 type pattern with the same value exists.
2211
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00002212- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
2213 when run from the command prompt).
2214
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00002215- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
2216 not taken into consideration when caching value.
2217
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00002218- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
2219 default sort).
2220
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00002221- Added global runctx function to profile module
2222
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00002223- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
2224
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00002225- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
2226
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00002227- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
2228
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00002229- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00002230 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
2231 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
2232 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
2233 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
2234 accordingly.
2235
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00002236- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
2237 decoding standards.
2238
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00002239- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
2240 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
2241 called for all requests.
2242
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00002243- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
2244 they are passed to the compiler.
2245
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00002246- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
2247 indent, width and depth.
2248
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00002249- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
2250 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
2251
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00002252- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
2253 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
2254
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00002255- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
2256
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00002257- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
2258
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00002259- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
2260
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00002261- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
2262 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
2263
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00002264- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00002265 for better performance.
2266
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00002267- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00002268
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00002269- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
2270 a string).
2271
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00002272- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
2273
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00002274- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
2275
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00002276- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
2277
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00002278- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
2279
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00002280- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
2281 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
2282 list of fieldnames.
2283
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00002284- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
2285 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
2286
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00002287- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
2288
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00002289- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
2290 empty lists.
2291
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00002292- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
2293 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
2294 and shelves.
2295
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00002296- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
2297 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
2298
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002299- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00002300 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
2301 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00002302
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00002303- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
2304 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00002305 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00002306
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002307- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00002308 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
2309 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
2310
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00002311- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
2312 and removed in Py2.4.
2313
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00002314- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
2315
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00002316- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
2317
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002318Tools/Demos
2319-----------
2320
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00002321- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
2322 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
2323
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00002324- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
2325
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00002326- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
2327 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
2328 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
2329 destination in situations where both files are given.
2330
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002331- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2332 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2333 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2334 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2335
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002336- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2337
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002338- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2339 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2340 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2341 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2342 now.
2343
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002344- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2345 in effect
2346
2347- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2348 C-c C-h
2349
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002350- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2351 -d option was given.
2352
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002353Build
2354-----
2355
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002356- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2357 build under OS X.
2358
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002359- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2360 --enable-profiling.
2361
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002362- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2363 is configured --with-tsc.
2364
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002365- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2366 on AMD64.
2367
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002368- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2369 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2370
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002371- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2372 removed.
2373
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002374- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2375 supported (see PEP 11).
2376
2377- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2378
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002379- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2380
2381- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2382 (see PEP 11).
2383
2384- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2385 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2386
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002387C API
2388-----
2389
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002390- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2391 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2392 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2393
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002394- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2395 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2396 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2397 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2398
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002399- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2400 generator objects.
2401
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002402- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2403 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002404 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2405 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002406
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002407- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2408 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2409
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002410- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2411 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2412 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2413 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2414 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2415
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002416- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2417 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2418 about 10% faster.
2419
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002420- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2421 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2422
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002423- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2424 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2425 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2426 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2427
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002428Windows
2429-------
2430
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002431- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2432 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2433 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2434 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2435
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002436- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2437 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2438 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2439
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002440
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002441What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2442===============================
2443
2444*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2445
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002446IDLE
2447----
2448
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002449- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2450 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2451 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2452 context-menu actions.
2453
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002454- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2455 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2456 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2457 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2458 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2459 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2460 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2461 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2462 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2463
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002464
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002465What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2466=============================================
2467
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002468*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002469
2470Core and builtins
2471-----------------
2472
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002473- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002474 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002475 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2476
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002477Extension modules
2478-----------------
2479
2480- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2481 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2482 than once. This has been fixed.
2483
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002484- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2485 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2486 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2487 call.
2488
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002489- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2490
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002491Library
2492-------
2493
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002494- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2495 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2496
2497- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2498 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2499 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2500 restored.
2501
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002502IDLE
2503----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002504
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002505- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002506
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002507Build
2508-----
2509
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002510- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2511 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2512
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002513C API
2514-----
2515
2516Windows
2517-------
2518
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002519- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2520 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2521
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002522- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2523
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002524Mac
2525---
2526
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002527- Various fixes to pimp.
2528
2529- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2530
2531- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2532 more problems than it solves.
2533
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002534
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002535What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2536=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002537
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002538*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2539
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002540Core and builtins
2541-----------------
2542
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002543- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2544 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2545
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002546- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2547 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002548 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002549
2550- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2551 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2552 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002553 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002554
2555- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2556 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002557
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002558- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2559 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2560 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2561
2562- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002563 770247.
2564
2565- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002566
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002567Extension modules
2568-----------------
2569
2570- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2571 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2572
2573- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2574
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002575- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2576
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002577- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2578 contained within the _strptime module.
2579
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002580- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2581 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2582
2583- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002584 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2585
2586- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2587 the find_class attribute, if present.
2588
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002589- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002590
2591 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2592 (SF bug 763298).
2593
2594 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002595 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2596 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2597 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002598
2599 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2600
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002601Library
2602-------
2603
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002604- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2605
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002606- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2607 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2608 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2609 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2610 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2611 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2612 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2613 or Tester().
2614
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002615- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2616 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2617 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2618 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2619 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2620 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2621 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2622 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2623 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002624
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002625 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002626
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002627- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2628 weren't before was an oversight.
2629
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002630- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2631 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2632
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002633- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2634 when there are no lines.
2635
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002636- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2637 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2638
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002639- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2640 to child processes.
2641
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002642- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2643
2644- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2645
2646- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2647 xmlrpclib.
2648
2649- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2650 responses.
2651
2652- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2653 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2654
2655- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2656 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2657 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2658
2659- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2660 used as patterns.
2661
2662- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2663 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2664 than Tk 8.3.
2665
2666- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2667
2668- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002669
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002670Tools/Demos
2671-----------
2672
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002673- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2674
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002675- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2676
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002677- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002678
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002679Build
2680-----
2681
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002682- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2683
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002684- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2685
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002686- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2687 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002688
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002689- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2690 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2691 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002692
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002693C API
2694-----
2695
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002696- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2697 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2698
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002699Windows
2700-------
2701
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002702- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2703 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2704 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2705 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2706 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2707 Python exception ::
2708
2709 thread.error: can't start new thread
2710
2711 is raised now.
2712
2713- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2714 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2715 instead of from DLL teardown.
2716
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002717Mac
2718---
2719
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002720- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002721 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002722 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2723 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2724 the executable in the bundle.
2725
2726- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002727
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002728- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2729
2730- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2731 on Panther.
2732
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002733What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2734================================
2735
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002736*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002737
2738Core and builtins
2739-----------------
2740
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002741- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2742 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2743 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2744 with the -i option.
2745
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002746- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2747 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2748
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002749- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2750 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2751
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002752- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2753 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2754 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2755 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2756 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2757 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2758 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2759 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2760 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2761 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2762 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2763 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2764 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002765
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002766- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2767 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2768 embedded in a lambda expression.
2769
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002770- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2771 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2772 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2773 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2774 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2775
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002776- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2777 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2778 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2779
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002780- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2781 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2782
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002783- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2784 It's writable again.
2785
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002786- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2787 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2788 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002789 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002790
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002791- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2792 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2793 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2794
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002795Extension modules
2796-----------------
2797
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002798- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2799 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2800
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002801- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2802 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2803 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2804 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2805
2806- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2807 collection.
2808
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002809- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2810 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2811 unique within a single program run.
2812
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002813- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2814 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2815
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002816- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2817 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2818
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002819- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2820 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002821
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002822- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2823
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002824- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2825 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2826
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002827- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2828 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2829 for many BSD-derived systems.
2830
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002831
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002832Library
2833-------
2834
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002835- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2836 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2837 primary ones:
2838
2839 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2840 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2841 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2842
2843 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2844 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2845 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2846 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2847 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2848 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2849
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002850- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2851 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2852 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2853 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2854 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2855 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2856 argument.
2857
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002858- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2859 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2860 in the archive.
2861
2862- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2863 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2864
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002865- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2866 569574).
2867
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002868- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2869 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2870 no more.
2871
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002872- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2873 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2874 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2875 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2876 code coverage.
2877
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002878- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2879 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2880 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002881 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2882 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002883
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002884- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2885 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2886 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002887 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002888
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002889- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2890
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002891- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2892 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2893 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2894 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2895
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002896- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2897 handling.
2898
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002899- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2900 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2901
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002902- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2903 in socket.py.
2904
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002905- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2906
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002907- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2908 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2909 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2910 opener with proxy support.
2911
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002912- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2913
2914- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2915
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002916Tools/Demos
2917-----------
2918
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002919- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2920
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002921- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2922
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002923- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2924 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002925
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002926- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2927 files.
2928
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002929Build
2930-----
2931
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002932- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002933 different root directory.
2934
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002935C API
2936-----
2937
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002938- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2939 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2940 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2941 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2942 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2943 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2944 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2945 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2946 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2947 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2948
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002949- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2950 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2951 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2952 from Python.
2953
2954
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002955New platforms
2956-------------
2957
2958None this time.
2959
2960Tests
2961-----
2962
2963- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2964 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2965
2966Windows
2967-------
2968
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002969- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2970
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002971- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2972 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2973 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2974 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2975 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2976 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2977 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2978 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2979 that's what it's for.
2980
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002981Mac
2982---
2983
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002984- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2985 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2986 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2987 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002988- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2989 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2990- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002991
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002992SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2993------------------------------------
2994
2995430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2996598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2997622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2998661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2999683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
3000697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
3001713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
3002724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
3003727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
3004729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
3005730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
3006731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
3007732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
3008733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
3009735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
3010740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
3011744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
3012745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
3013747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
3014749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
3015751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
3016753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
3017755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
3018757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
3019760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
3020
3021
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003022What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
3023================================
3024
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00003025*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003026
3027Core and builtins
3028-----------------
3029
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00003030- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
3031 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
3032
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00003033- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
3034 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
3035 and cannot be strings).
3036
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00003037- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
3038 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
3039 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
3040 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
3041
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00003042- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
3043 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
3044 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
3045 Python itself.
3046
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00003047- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
3048 the referenced object, if it has one.
3049
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00003050- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
3051 the thread started at
3052 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
3053
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00003054- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
3055 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
3056 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
3057 placed on a list index.
3058
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00003059- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
3060 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
3061 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
3062 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
3063
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003064- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
3065 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
3066 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
3067 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
3068 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
3069 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
3070 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
3071
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00003072- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
3073 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
3074 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
3075 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
3076 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
3077
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00003078- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
3079 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00003080
3081- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
3082 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
3083 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
3084 #693195.)
3085
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00003086- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
3087 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003088
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003089- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00003090 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00003091 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
3092 interpreter executions, would fail.
3093
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003094- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00003095 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00003096 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00003097
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003098Extension modules
3099-----------------
3100
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00003101- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
3102 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
3103 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
3104 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
3105
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00003106- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
3107 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
3108
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00003109- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
3110 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
3111 and Greg Chapman.)
3112
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003113- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
3114 recursively.
3115
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00003116- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00003117 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
3118 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
3119 leaks.
3120
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00003121- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
3122
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00003123- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
3124 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
3125 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
3126 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
3127 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
3128 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
3129 #705836.
3130
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00003131- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00003132 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
3133
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00003134- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
3135 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
3136 See SF bug #692416.
3137
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00003138- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
3139 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
3140
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00003141- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
3142 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
3143 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003144
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003145- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00003146 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
3147 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
3148
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00003149- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
3150 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
3151 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
3152 timeouts to work properly.
3153
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003154Library
3155-------
3156
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00003157- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
3158 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
3159 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
3160 future release.
3161
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00003162- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
3163 for querying platform dependent features.
3164
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00003165- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00003166
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00003167- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
3168 pickle protocol versions.
3169
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00003170- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
3171 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
3172 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
3173
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00003174- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
3175
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00003176- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
3177 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
3178 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
3179 modules.
3180
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00003181- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
3182 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
3183 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
3184
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00003185- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
3186 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
3187
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00003188- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
3189 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
3190 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
3191
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003192- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00003193 MS Office extensions.
3194
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00003195- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
3196 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
3197
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00003198- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
3199 execution speed of expressions and statements.
3200
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003201- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
3202 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
3203 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
3204 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
3205 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
3206 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
3207
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003208- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
3209 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
3210 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003211
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00003212- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
3213 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
3214 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
3215
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00003216- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
3217
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00003218- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
3219 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
3220 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
3221
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003222Tools/Demos
3223-----------
3224
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00003225- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
3226 See the module docstring for details.
3227
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003228Build
3229-----
3230
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00003231- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
3232 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003233
3234C API
3235-----
3236
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003237- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
3238
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00003239- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
3240 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
3241 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
3242
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003243- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
3244 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003245
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00003246 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
3247 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
3248 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00003249
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00003250- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00003251 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
3252
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00003253- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
3254 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
3255 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003256
3257New platforms
3258-------------
3259
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00003260None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003261
3262Tests
3263-----
3264
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00003265- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
3266 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003267
3268Windows
3269-------
3270
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00003271- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
3272 function.
3273
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00003274- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
3275 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003276
3277Mac
3278---
3279
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00003280- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
3281 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00003282
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00003283- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
3284 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003285
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00003286- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
3287 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
3288 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003289
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003290- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00003291 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
3292 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00003293
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00003294- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
3295 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003296
3297
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003298What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
3299=================================
3300
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003301*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003302
3303Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003304-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003305
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00003306- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
3307 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
3308 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
3309
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00003310- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
3311 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
3312 (SF patch #664376.)
3313
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003314- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
3315 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
3316 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
3317 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
3318 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
3319 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00003320 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00003321
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003322- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
3323 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
3324 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
3325 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003326 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00003327
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00003328- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
3329 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3330 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3331 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3332 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3333 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3334 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3335 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3336 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3337 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3338 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3339
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003340- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3341 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3342 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3343 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3344 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3345 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3346
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003347- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3348 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3349
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003350- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3351 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3352 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3353 case.)
3354
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003355- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3356 passed as unicode strings.
3357
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003358- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3359 See SF bug #683467.
3360
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003361- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3362 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3363
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003364- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3365
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003366- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3367
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003368- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3369 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3370 arguments.
3371
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003372- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3373 See SF bug #667147.
3374
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003375- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003376 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003377 See SF bug #676155.
3378
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003379- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003380 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003381 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3382 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3383 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3384 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3385 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3386 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003387
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003388Extension modules
3389-----------------
3390
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003391- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3392 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3393 tp_as_number pointer.
3394
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003395- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3396 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3397 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3398 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3399 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3400
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003401- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3402
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003403- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3404
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003405- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003406 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003407 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3408 patch #678531.)
3409
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003410- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3411 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3412
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003413- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3414 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3415
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003416- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3417
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003418- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3419 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3420 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3421
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003422- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3423
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003424- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3425 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3426
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003427- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003428
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003429- datetime changes:
3430
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003431 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3432
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003433 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3434 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3435 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3436 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3437 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3438 now.
3439
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003440 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003441 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3442 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003443
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003444 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003445 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003446 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3447 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3448 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3449 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003450
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003451 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3452 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3453 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003454 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3455
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003456 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3457 by a later example coded by Guido.
3458
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003459 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003460 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3461 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3462 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003463 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3464 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3465
3466 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3467 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3468 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3469 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3470 tzinfo subclass instance.
3471
3472 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3473 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3474 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3475 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3476 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3477 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3478 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3479 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003480
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003481 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3482 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3483 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3484 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3485 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003486 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3487
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003488 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003489
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003490 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3491 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3492 as a naive datetime object.
3493
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003494 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3495 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3496 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3497
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003498 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3499 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3500 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3501 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3502 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3503 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3504 comparison.
3505
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003506 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3507 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3508 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3509 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003510 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003511
3512 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003513
3514 and ::
3515
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003516 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3517
3518 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3519 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3520 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3521 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3522
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003523 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3524 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3525 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3526 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3527 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3528
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003529 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3530 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003531 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3532 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003533
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003534Library
3535-------
3536
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003537- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3538 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3539
3540- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3541 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3542 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3543 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3544 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3545 See PEP 307 for details.
3546
3547- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3548 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3549
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003550- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3551 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003552 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003553 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3554 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003555 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003556
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003557- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3558 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3559
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003560- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3561 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3562 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3563
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003564- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3565
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003566- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3567 exception.
3568
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003569- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3570 class.
3571
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003572- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3573 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3574 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3575
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003576- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3577 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3578
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003579- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003580 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3581 See SF bug #659228.
3582
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003583- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3584 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3585 See SF patch #651082.
3586
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003587- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003588
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003589- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3590 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3591
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003592- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003593 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003594
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003595- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3596 DOS paths from other platforms.
3597
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003598Tools/Demos
3599-----------
3600
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003601- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3602 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3603 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3604 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3605 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3606 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3607 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3608 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3609 example:
3610
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003611 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3612 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003613
3614 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3615
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003616
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003617Build
3618-----
3619
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003620- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3621 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3622 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003623 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3624
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003625 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3626
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003627- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3628 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3629 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3630 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3631 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3632 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3633 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3634 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3635 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3636
3637- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3638 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3639 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3640 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3641
3642- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3643 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3644
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003645C API
3646-----
3647
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003648- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3649 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003650
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003651- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3652 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3653 tp_as_number pointer.
3654
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003655- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3656 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3657 (SF #681367)
3658
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003659- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3660 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3661 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3662 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003663
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003664Tests
3665-----
3666
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003667- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003668 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3669 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3670 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3671 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3672 pydoc.)
3673
3674- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3675
3676- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003677
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003678Windows
3679-------
3680
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003681- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3682 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3683 time).
3684
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003685- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3686 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3687
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003688- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3689 release without strong cryptography.
3690
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003691- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003692 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003693
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003694- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3695 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3696
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003697Mac
3698---
3699
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003700- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3701 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003702
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003703- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3704 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3705 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003706
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003707- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3708 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003709
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003710- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3711 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3712 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3713 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003714
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003715- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003716 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3717 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3718 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003719
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003720
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003721What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003722=================================
3723
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003724*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003726Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003728
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003729- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3730
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003731- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3732 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003733 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003734 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003735 a different meaning than before.
3736
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003737- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003738 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003739 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003740
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003741- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003742 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003743 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003744
3745- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3746 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3747 and deallocation.
3748
3749- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3750 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3751
3752- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3753 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3754 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3755 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3756 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3757
3758- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3759 now detected by the garbage collector.
3760
3761- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3762 [SF bug 519621]
3763
3764- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3765 identifier.
3766
3767- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3768 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3769 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3770 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3771 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3772 [SF bug 563060]
3773
3774- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3775 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3776 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3777 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3778 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3779
3780- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3781 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3782 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3783
3784- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3785
3786- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3787 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3788 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3789 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3790 state of the slots would be lost.)
3791
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003792Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003793-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003794
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003795- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003796 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3797 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3798 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3799 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003800 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3801 Jython 2.1.
3802
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003803- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003804 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003805 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3806 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3807 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3808 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3809 these, see PEP 302.
3810
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003811- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3812 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3813 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3814
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003815- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3816 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3817 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3818
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003819- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3820 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3821 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3822
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003823- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3824 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3825 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3826 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3827 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3828 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3829 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3830 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3831 releases or implementations.
3832
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003833- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003834 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3835 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003836
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003837- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3838 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3839
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003840- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3841 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3842 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3843
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003844- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3845 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3846
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003847- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3848 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003849 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3850 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003851
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003852- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3853 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3854 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3855 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3856 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3857
3858 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3859 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3860 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3861 pattern.
3862
3863 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3864 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3865 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3866 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3867
3868 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3869 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3870 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3871 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3872 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3873 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3874
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003875- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3876 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3877 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3878 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3879 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3880 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3881 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3882 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003883
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003884- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3885 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3886 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3887 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3888 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003889 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3890 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3891 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3892 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3893 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3894 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3895 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003896
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003897- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3898 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3899
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003900- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3901 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3902 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3903 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3904 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3905 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3906 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3907 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3908 to Zack Weinberg!
3909
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003910- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3911 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3912 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3913 type. This has been fixed now.
3914
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003915- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3916 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3917 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3918
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003919- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3920 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3921 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3922 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3923 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3924 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3925 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3926 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003927 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003928
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003929- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3930 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3931 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003932
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003933- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3934 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3935 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3936 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3937 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3938 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3939 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3940 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003941 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003942 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3943 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3944
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003945- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3946 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3947 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3948 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3949 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3950 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3951 this.)
3952
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003953- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3954 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003955 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003956 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003957 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3958 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003959 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3960 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003961
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003962- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3963 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3964 currently running.
3965
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003966- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3967 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3968 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3969 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3970
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003971- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3972 as directory names.
3973
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003974- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3975 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3976
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003977- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3978 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3979
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003980- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003981 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3982 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003983
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003984- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3985 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3986 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3987 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3988 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3989
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003990- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3991 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3992 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3993 removed.
3994
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003995- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3996 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3997 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3998
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003999- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
4000 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
4001 to __debug__.
4002
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00004003- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
4004 string to the left with zeros. For example,
4005 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
4006
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00004007- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
4008 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
4009 deprecated now.
4010
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00004011- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
4012 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
4013 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00004014
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00004015- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
4016 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
4017 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
4018 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
4019 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00004020
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00004021- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
4022 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
4023
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004024- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
4025 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
4026 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004027 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00004028 is backward compatible.
4029
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00004030- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
4031 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
4032 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
4033 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
4034 could access a pointer to freed memory.
4035
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00004036- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
4037 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
4038 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
4039 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
4040 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
4041 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004042
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00004043- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
4044 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
4045
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004046- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
4047 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
4048
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004049- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
4050 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
4051 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
4052 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
4053 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
4054
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00004055- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
4056 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
4057 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
4058
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004059- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00004060 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
4061
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00004062- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
4063 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
4064 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00004065
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00004066- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
4067 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
4068
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00004069- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
4070 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
4071 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
4072
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00004073- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
4074
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004075Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004077
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00004078- Added three operators to the operator module:
4079 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
4080 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
4081 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
4082
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00004083- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
4084
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00004085- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
4086 archives.
4087
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004088- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
4089 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
4090 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
4091
4092 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
4093
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004094- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
4095 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
4096 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00004097 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00004098
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00004099- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
4100 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
4101 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
4102 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00004103 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
4104 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
4105 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
4106 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00004107
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00004108- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
4109 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00004110
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00004111- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
4112
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00004113- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
4114 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
4115
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00004116- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
4117 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
4118 supported.
4119
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00004120- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
4121
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00004122- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
4123 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00004124
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00004125- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
4126 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
4127
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00004128- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
4129
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004130- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
4131 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
4132
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00004133- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
4134 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
4135 functions but callable type objects.
4136
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004137- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004138 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004139 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00004140
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00004141- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
4142 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00004143
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00004144- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
4145 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00004146
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00004147- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
4148 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
4149 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
4150 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
4151
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00004152- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
4153 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00004154
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00004155- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
4156 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
4157 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
4158 and __imul__.
4159
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00004160- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00004161 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
4162 is called.
4163
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00004164- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
4165 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
4166 interpreter was compiled.
4167
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004168- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
4169 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
4170 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004171 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00004172 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
4173 1, not 2.
4174
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00004175- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
4176 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
4177 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
4178 limit.
4179
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00004180- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
4181 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
4182 bug #623464.
4183
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00004184- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
4185 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
4186 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
4187 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
4188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004189Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004191
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00004192- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
4193
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00004194- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
4195 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
4196 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
4197 with Python 2.3a2.
4198
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00004199- os.path exposes getctime.
4200
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004201- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004202 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004203 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004204 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004205 unit tests of floating point results.
4206
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00004207- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
4208 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
4209 has been increased.
4210
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00004211- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
4212 executed.
4213
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00004214- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
4215 postinstallation script.
4216
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00004217- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
4218 test the current module.
4219
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004220- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00004221 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
4222 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
4223 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
4224 this behavior needs to be controlled.
4225
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004226- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004227 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00004228 Ward's Optik package.
4229
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004230- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
4231 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
4232 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
4233 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
4234
4235- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
4236 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00004237 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00004238
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00004239- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
4240 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
4241 shelf are binary pickles.
4242
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00004243- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
4244 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
4245
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00004246- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
4247 modules are iterators now.
4248
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00004249- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
4250 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
4251 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
4252 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
4253 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
4254 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004255
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00004256- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
4257 with their entity value.
4258
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00004259- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
4260
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004261- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
4262 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00004263
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00004264- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
4265 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00004266 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00004267
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00004268- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
4269 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
4270 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
4271 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
4272 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
4273 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
4274 main():
4275
4276 import locale
4277 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
4278
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00004279- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
4280 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
4281
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00004282- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
4283 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
4284 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
4285 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
4286 to the new standard.
4287
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00004288- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
4289 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
4290 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
4291 an extension to the database.
4292
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004293- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
4294 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
4295 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
4296 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00004297 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00004298
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004299- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00004300 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00004301
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00004302- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
4303 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
4304 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
4305 bounded integers.
4306
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00004307- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
4308 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
4309 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
4310 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
4311 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
4312 in existence.
4313
4314 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
4315 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
4316 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
4317 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
4318 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
4319 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
4320
4321 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
4322 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
4323 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
4324 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
4325
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00004326- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
4327 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
4328 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
4329
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004330- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4331
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004332- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4333 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4334 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4335 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4336
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004337- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4338 argument.
4339
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004340- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4341 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4342 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4343 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4344 [SF patch 560794].
4345
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004346- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4347 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4348 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004349 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4350 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4351 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004352
4353- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4354 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004355
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004356- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4357 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4358 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4359 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004360
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004361- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4362 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4363 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4364 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4365 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4366
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004367- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004368
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004369- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4370
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004371- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4372 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4373 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4374 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4375 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4376 identical to None.
4377
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004378- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4379 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4380 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4381 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4382 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4383 results now.
4384
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004385- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4386 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4387
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004388- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4389 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4390 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4391 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4392 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4393 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4394 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4395 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4396
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004397- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4398
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004399- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4400 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4401
4402- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4403 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4404 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4405 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4406 and other systems.
4407
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004408- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4409 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4410 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4411 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 +00004412 work well with these.
4413
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004414- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4415
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004416- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004417 connections.
4418
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004419- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4420 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4421 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4422
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004423- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4424 sets
4425
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004426- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4427 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4428 name.
4429
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004430- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4431 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4432 passed in.
4433
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004434- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004435 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004436 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4437 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004438
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004439- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4440
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004441- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4442
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004443- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4444 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4445 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4446
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004447- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4448 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4449 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4450 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004451 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004452
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004453- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004454 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004455 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004456
4457- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4458 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4459 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4460
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004461- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004462 the value of its expression argument.
4463
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004464- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4465 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4466 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4467
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004468- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4469 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4470 skipstone browser was included.
4471
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004472- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4473 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4474
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004475Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004477
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004478- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4479 names in addition to accepting file names.
4480
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004481- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4482 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4483 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4484 still used and useful.)
4485
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004486- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4487 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4488 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4489 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004490
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004491- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4492 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4493 the generated binary.
4494
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004495Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004497
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004498- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4499
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004500- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4501 except in the hands of experts.
4502
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004503- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004504 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4505 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4506 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004507
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004508- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4509 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4510 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4511 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4512 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4513 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4514 builds.
4515
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004516- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4517 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4518 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4519 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4520 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4521 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4522 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4523 new type.
4524
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004525- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004526
4527 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4528 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4529 positive infinities.
4530
4531 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4532 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4533 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4534 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4535 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4536 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4537 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4538
4539 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4540
4541 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4542
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004543- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4544 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4545 size of the executable.
4546
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004547- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4548 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4549 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4550 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004551
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004552- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4553
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004554- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4555 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4556 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004557
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004558- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4559 well as Unix.
4560
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004561- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4562 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4563 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4564 modules in the README file for details.
4565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004566C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004568
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004569- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4570 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004571 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004572 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004573 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004574
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004575- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4576 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4577 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4578 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4579 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4580 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004581 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004582 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4583 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4584 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4585 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4586 aligned.)
4587
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004588- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4589 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4590 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4591
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004592- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4593 level.
4594
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004595- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4596 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4597 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4598 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4599 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4600
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004601- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4602 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4603 code.
4604
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004605- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4606 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4607 adjusting for negative indices.
4608
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004609- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4610 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4611 object.
4612
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004613- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4614 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4615 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4616
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004617- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4618 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004619
4620- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4621
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004622- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4623 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4624 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4625 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4626
4627- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4628
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004629- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004630
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004631- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004632 without going through the buffer API.
4633
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004635
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004636- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4637 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4638 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4639 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004641- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4642 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4643
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004644- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004645 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4646
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004647New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004649
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004650- OpenVMS is now supported.
4651
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004652- AtheOS is now supported.
4653
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004654- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4655
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004656- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4657
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004658Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----
4660
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004661- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4662 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4663 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004664
4665Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004666-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004667
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004668- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4669 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4670 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4671 bugs.
4672 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004673 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004674 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4675 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004676 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004677
4678- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004679 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004680
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004681- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4682 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4683
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004684- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4685 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004686 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004687 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4688
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004689- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4690 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4691 use files" uninstall option).
4692
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004693- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4694
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004695- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4696 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4697
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004698- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4699 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4700 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4701
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004702- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4703 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4704 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4705 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4706 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004707 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4708 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4709 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004710
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004711- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004712 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004713 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4714 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4715 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4716 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4717 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4718 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4719 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4720 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4721 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4722 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4723 work around.
4724
4725- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4726 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4727 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4728 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4729 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4730 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4731 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4732 specified with O_CREAT too).
4733
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004734Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735----
4736
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004737- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004738
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004739- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4740 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4741 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4742
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004743- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4744 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4745 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4746
4747- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4748 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4749 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4750 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4751 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4752 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4753 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4754 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004755
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004756- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4757 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4758 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004759
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004760- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4761 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4762 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4763 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4764 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004765
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004766- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4767 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4768 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004769
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004770- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4771 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004772
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004773- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4774 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4775 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4776 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4777 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004778
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004779- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4780 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4781 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4782
4783- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4784 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4785 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004786
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004787- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4788 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4789 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4790 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004791 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004792
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004793- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4794 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004795
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004796- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4797 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004798
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004799- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004800 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004801 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4802 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004803
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004804
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004805What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004806===============================
4807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4809
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004810Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004812
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004813- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4814 with a custom metaclass.
4815
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004816Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004818
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004819- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4820 are proxies.
4821
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004822Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004824
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004825- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4826 very short strings.
4827
4828- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4829 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4830 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4831 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4832 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4833
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004834Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004836
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004837- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4838 close or delete time).
4839
4840- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4841 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4842
4843- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4844
4845- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004846 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004847
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004848Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004849-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004850
4851Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004853
4854C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004855-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004856
4857New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004859
4860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004862
4863Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004864-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004865
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004866- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4867
4868- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4869 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4870
4871- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4872 deleted at process exit time.
4873
4874- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4875 in backslash.
4876
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004877Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004879
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004880- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4881 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4882 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4883
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004884
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004885What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004886===========================
4887
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4889
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004890Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004891--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004892
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004893- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4894 been extensively updated. See
4895
4896 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4897
4898 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4899
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004900- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4901 deleted!
4902
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004903- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4904 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4905 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4906 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4907 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4908
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004909- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4910
4911 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4912 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4913
4914 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4915 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4916 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4917 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4918 supported anyway.
4919
4920 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4921 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4922
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004923- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4924 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4925 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4926 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4927 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004928
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004929- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4930 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4931 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4932
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004933Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004934-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004935
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004936- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4937 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4938 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4939 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4940 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4941 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004942 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4943 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4944 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4945 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004946
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004947- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4948 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4949 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4950
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004951Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004953
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004954- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4955
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004956Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004957-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004958
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004959- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4960 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4961 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4962 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4963 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4964 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4965
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004966- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4967
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004968- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4969
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004970- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4971
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004972- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4973 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4974 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4975
4976- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4977
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004978Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004979-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004980
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004981- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4982 off a search on Google.
4983
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004984Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004985-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004986
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004987- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4988 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4989 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4990 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4991 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4992 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4993 other platforms should do likewise.
4994
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004995- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4996 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4997 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4998
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004999C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005000-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005001
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005002- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
5003 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
5004 producing key-value pairs.
5005
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005006- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00005007 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00005008 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
5009 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
5010 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
5011 previously went unchallenged.
5012
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005013New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005015
5016Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005018
5019Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005020-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005021
5022Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005023----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005024
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00005025- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
5026 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00005027
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00005028- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
5029 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
5030 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
5031 home.
5032
5033
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005034What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005035===========================
5036
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
5038
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005039Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005041
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005042- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
5043 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005044
5045 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00005046 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005047
5048 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
5049 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005050 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00005051 This needs to be documented.
5052
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00005053- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
5054 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
5055
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00005056- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
5057 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
5058 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
5059
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00005060- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
5061 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
5062
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005063- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
5064 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
5065 class forbids it).
5066
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00005067- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
5068 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
5069 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
5070
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005071- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
5072
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005073Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005074-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005075
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005076- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
5077 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005078 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00005079
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005080- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
5081 (like 1 + '').
5082
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005083Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005084-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005085
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005086- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
5087 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
5088 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
5089 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005090 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005091 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
5092
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00005093- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
5094 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
5095 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
5096 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
5097
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005098- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
5099 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005100 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
5101 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
5102 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00005103
5104- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
5105 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005106
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00005107- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
5108 bytes on its input.
5109
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005110Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005111-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005112
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00005113- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00005114 convenience function.
5115
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005116- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
5117 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
5118 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005119 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
5120 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
5121 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
5122 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
5123 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
5124 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00005125
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00005126- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
5127 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
5128 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
5129 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
5130
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00005131- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
5132 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
5133 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
5134
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005135- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
5136 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
5137 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
5138 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
5139
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005140- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
5141 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005142 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005143 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
5144 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
5145 new -l and -e options.
5146
5147- statcache is now deprecated.
5148
5149- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
5150 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005151 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005152 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
5153 time properly taken into account.
5154
5155- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
5156 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
5157 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
5158 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
5159
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005160Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005162
5163Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005165
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005166- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
5167 is built with libdb3 if available.
5168
5169- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
5170
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005171C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005173
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00005174- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
5175 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
5176 PySequence_Size().
5177
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005178- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
5179
5180- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
5181 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
5182 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
5183
5184- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
5185 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
5186
5187- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
5188 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
5189
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005190New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005191-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005192
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00005193- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
5194 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
5195
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00005196- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
5197 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
5198
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00005199- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
5200
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005201Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005203
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00005204- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
5205 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
5206
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005207Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005209
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005210Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00005212
5213- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
5214 removed completely in the next release.
5215
5216- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
5217 OSX.
5218
5219- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
5220 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
5221
5222- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
5223
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00005224
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005225What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005226===========================
5227
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005228*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
5229
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005230Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005231--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005232
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005233- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005234 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005235 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005236 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
5237 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00005238 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
5239 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00005240 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
5241 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00005242
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00005243- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
5244 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
5245
5246- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
5247 class methods, static methods, and properties.
5248
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005249Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005250-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005251
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00005252- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
5253 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
5254 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
5255 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
5256 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
5257 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
5258 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
5259 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
5260
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005261- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
5262 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
5263 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
5264 example).
5265
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005266- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005267 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005268 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005269 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00005270
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005271- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
5272 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
5273 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00005274 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005275
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005276- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
5277 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
5278 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
5279 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
5280 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
5281 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
5282
5283 isinstance(x, (A, B))
5284
5285 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
5286
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005287Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005288-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005289
5290- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
5291
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005292- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
5293
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005294- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
5295 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00005296
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00005297- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
5298 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
5299 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
5300 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
5301 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
5302 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00005303 attributes.
5304
5305- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
5306 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
5307 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00005308
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005309- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
5310 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
5311 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005312
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005313- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
5314 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
5315 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005316 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
5317 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
5318
5319- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
5320 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00005321
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00005322Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005323-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005324
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00005325- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
5326 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
5327
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005328- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
5329 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5330 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5331 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5332
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005333- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5334 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5335 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5336 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5337
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005338 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5339 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5340 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5341 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5342 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5343 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5344 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5345 without losing information).
5346
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005347- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005348 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5349 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5350 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5351 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5352 module).
5353
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005354 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005355 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5356 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5357 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5358 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005359
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005360- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005361 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5362 encoding.
5363
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005364- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5365 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005367- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005368 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5369
5370- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5371 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5372 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5373 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5374
5375- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5376
5377- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5378 ON, and OFF.
5379
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005380- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5381 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5382
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005383Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005384-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005385
5386- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5387 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5388 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005389
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005390- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5391 been added: -X and -E.
5392
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005393Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005394-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005395
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005396- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5397 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5398
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005399C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005400-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005401
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005402- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5403 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5404 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5405 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5406 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5407
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005408- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5409 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5410 as long) arguments.
5411
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005412- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5413 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5414 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5415 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5416 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5417 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5418
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005419- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5420 input.
5421
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005422New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005423-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005424
5425Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005426-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005427
5428Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005429-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005430
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005431- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5432 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5433 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5434
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005435- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5436 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5437 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005438 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005439
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005440 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5441 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5442 import signal
5443 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005444
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005445 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005446 while 1:
5447 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005448 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005449 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5450 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5451 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5452 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005453
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005454
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005455What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5456===========================
5457
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005458*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5459
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005460Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005461--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005462
5463- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5464 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5465 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5466
5467- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5468 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5469 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5470 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5471 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5472 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5473 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005474
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005475- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005476 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005477 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5478 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5479 associate a docstring with a property.
5480
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005481- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5482 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5483 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5484 other built-in object types.
5485
5486- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5487 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5488 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5489 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5490 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5491
5492- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5493 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5494
5495- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5496 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005497 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005498 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5499 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5500 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5501 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5502 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5503
5504- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5505 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5506 class.
5507
5508- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5509 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5510 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5511 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5512
5513- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5514 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5515 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5516 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5517
5518- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5519 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5520
5521- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5522 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5523 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5524 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5525 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005526 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005527 with the same value as s.
5528
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005529- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5530
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005531Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005532----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005533
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005534- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5535
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005536- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5537 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5538 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5539 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5540 objects.
5541
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005542- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5543 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005544 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5545 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5546
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005547- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5548 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5549 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005551Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005552-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005553
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005554- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5555 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5556 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5557 by the instances.
5558
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005559- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5560 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5561 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5562
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005563- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5564 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5565 before the entire comparison is complete.
5566
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005567- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5568 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5569 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5570
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005571- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5572 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5573 getwriter().
5574
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005575- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5576 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5577
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005578- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005579 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5580 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5581
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005582- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5583 iterable object.
5584
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005585- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5586 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005587
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005588- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5589 authentication.
5590
5591- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5592 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005593
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005594- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005595 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5596 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5597 a sample driver.)
5598
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005599Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005600-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005601
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005602- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5603 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5604 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5605 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5606 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5607 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5608 kernel has large file support.
5609
5610- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5611 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5612 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5613 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5614 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5615
5616- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5617 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5618 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5619
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005620C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005621-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005622
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005623- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5624 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5625
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005626New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005627-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005628
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005629- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5630 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5631
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005632Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005633-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005634
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005635- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5636 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5637 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5638 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5639 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5640
5641- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5642 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5643 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5644 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5645
5646- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5647 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5648
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005649Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005650-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005651
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005652- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005653 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5654 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005655
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005656
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005657What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5658===========================
5659
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005660*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5661
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005662Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005663----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005664
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005665- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5666 big to represent as a C double.
5667
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005668- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5669 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5670 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5671 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5672 restriction).
5673
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005674- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5675 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5676 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5677 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5678 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5679
5680 >>> dir([])
5681 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5682 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5683 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5684 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5685 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5686 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5687 'reverse', 'sort']
5688
5689 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5690
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005691- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005692 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5693 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5694 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5695 OverflowError exception.
5696
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005697- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005698 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005699 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5700 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5701 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5702 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5703 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005704 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005705 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5706 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5707
5708 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5709 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5710 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5711 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005712
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005713- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005714 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5715 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5716 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5717 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5718 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5719 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5720 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5721 once it is created.
5722
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005723- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5724 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5725 (key, value) pairs.
5726
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005727- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005728 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5729 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5730
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005731- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5732 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5733 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5734 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5735 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005736
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005737- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005738 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5739 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5740
5741 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5742
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005743- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005744 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5745
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005746Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005747-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005748
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005749- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005750 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5751 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005752
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005753- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5754 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5755 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5756 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5757 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5758 in this area anymore).
5759
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005760- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5761 threading.Timer.
5762
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005763- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5764 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5765
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005766- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005767 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5768
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005769- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005770 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5771 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5772 converted to Python longs.
5773
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005774- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005775 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5776
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005777- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5778 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5779 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5780
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005781Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005782-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005783
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005784- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5785 division operators as per PEP 238.
5786
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005787Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005788-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005789
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005790- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5791 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5792 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5793 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5794
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005795C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005796-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005797
5798- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005799
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005800- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5801 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005802 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005803
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005804 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5805 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005806 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005807 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005808
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005809- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005810 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5811 module:
5812
5813 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005814
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005815 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5816 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005817
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005818 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5819 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005820
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005821 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5822
5823 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5824
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005825- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005826 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5827 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5828 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005829
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005830New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005831-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005832
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005833- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5834 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5835 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5836 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5837 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005838
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005839Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005840-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005841
5842Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005843-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005844
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005845- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5846 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5847 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5848 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005849 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5850 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5851 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5852 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5853 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005855- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005856 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5857
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005858
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005859What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5860===========================
5861
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005862*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5863
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005864Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005865-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005866
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005867- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5868 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5869
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005870- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5871 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5872 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005873
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005874- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5875 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5876 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5877 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005878
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005879- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5880
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005881- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005882
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005883Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005884-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005885
5886- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005887 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005888 the module docstring for details.
5889
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005890Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005891-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005892
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005893- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005894 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5895 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5896 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005897
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005898- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5899 Nick Mathewson.
5900
5901Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005902----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005903
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005904- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5905 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5906 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5907 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5908 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5909 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5910 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5911 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5912
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005913- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5914 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5915 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5916 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5917
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005918- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5919 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5920 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5921 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5922 come a long way).
5923
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005924- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5925 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5926 write filters for these warnings).
5927
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005928- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5929 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5930 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5931 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5932 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5933
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005934- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5935 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5936 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5937 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5938 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5939 older distribution.
5940
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005941Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005942-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005943
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005944- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5945 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005946 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005947
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005948- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5949 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5950 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5951
5952- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5953
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005954- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5955
5956- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5957
5958- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5959
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005960- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005961
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005962- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5963
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005964New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005965-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005966
5967C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005968-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005969
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005970- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5971 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5972 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5973 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5974 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5975 against buffer overruns.
5976
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005977- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005978 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5979 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005980 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5981 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5982 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5983
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005984- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5985 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5986 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5987 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5988 deprecated.
5989
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005990Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005991-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005992
5993- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5994 relevant is found.
5995
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005996
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005997What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005998===========================
5999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006000*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
6001
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006002Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006003----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006004
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006005- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
6006 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
6007 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
6008 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
6009 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
6010 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
6011 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
6012 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006013 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00006014 repaired.
6015
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006016- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00006017 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00006018 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
6019 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
6020 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
6021 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
6022 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
6023 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
6024 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
6025 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
6026
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00006027- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
6028 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
6029 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
6030 leading BMO character).
6031
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006032- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
6033 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
6034 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
6035
6036 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
6037 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
6038 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006039
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006040 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
6041 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
6042 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
6043 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
6044 for various simple to use conversions.
6045
6046 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
6047 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
6048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006049 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6050 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
6051 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
6052 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
6053 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6054 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
6055 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6056 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
6057 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6058 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
6059 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6060 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
6061 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
6062 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
6063 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00006064
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006065- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
6066 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
6067 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006068 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006069 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006070
6071 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006072 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
6073 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
6074 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
6075 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
6076 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006077 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
6078 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00006079
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006080 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
6081 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
6082 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00006083 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006084
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00006085- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
6086 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
6087 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
6088 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
6089 floating arithmetic,
6090
6091 x = 9007199254740992.0
6092 print long(x)
6093
6094 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
6095 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
6096 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
6097 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
6098 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
6099 functions are of good quality).
6100
6101 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
6102 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
6103 algorithms to break.
6104
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00006105- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
6106 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
6107 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
6108 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
6109 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
6110 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
6111 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
6112 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
6113 order.
6114
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006115- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
6116 operation along the most common code paths.
6117
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006118- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
6119 the same as dict.has_key(x).
6120
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00006121- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
6122 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
6123 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
6124 {}.update(UserDict())
6125
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00006126- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
6127 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
6128 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
6129 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
6130 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
6131 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
6132 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
6133 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
6134
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00006135- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00006136 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006137
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006138 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00006139 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
6140 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00006141 join() method of strings
6142 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006143 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
6144 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006145 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00006146 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00006147
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00006148- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
6149 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
6150
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00006151- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
6152 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
6153
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00006154- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
6155 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
6156 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
6157 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
6158
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006159- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
6160 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006161 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00006162 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
6163 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00006164
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00006165- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
6166
6167
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006168Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006169-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006170
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006171- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006172 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00006173 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
6174 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
6175
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00006176- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
6177 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
6178
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00006179- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
6180 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
6181 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
6182 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
6183
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00006184- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
6185 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
6186 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
6187
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00006188- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
6189
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00006190- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
6191
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00006192- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
6193 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
6194 that are still imported into string.py).
6195
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006196- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
6197
6198- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
6199 Now it does.
6200
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006201- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
6202
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006203- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
6204 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
6205 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
6206 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
6207 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00006208 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
6209 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00006210
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00006211- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
6212 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
6213 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
6214 'help(object)'.
6215
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006216Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006217-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006218
6219- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006220 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006221 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
6222 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
6223
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00006224- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00006225 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
6226 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00006227
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006228C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006229-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00006230
6231- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
6232 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00006233
6234----
6235
6236**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**