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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000015- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
16 a TypeError exception.
17
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000018Extension modules
19-----------------
20
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000021- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
22
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000023- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
24
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000025Library
26-------
27
Raymond Hettingerb5a42082003-08-08 05:10:41 +000028- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
29 of raising a TypeError exception.
30
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +000031- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +000032 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
33 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
34
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +000035- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
36 and removed in Py2.4.
37
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000038Tools/Demos
39-----------
40
41- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
42 in effect
43
44- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
45 C-c C-h
46
47Build
48-----
49
50C API
51-----
52
53New platforms
54-------------
55
56Tests
57-----
58
59Windows
60-------
61
62Mac
63----
64
65
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +000066What's New in Python 2.3 final?
67===============================
68
69*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
70
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +000071IDLE
72----
73
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +000074- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
75 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
76 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
77 context-menu actions.
78
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +000079- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
80 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
81 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
82 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
83 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
84 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
85 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
86 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
87 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
88
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +000089
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000090What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
91=============================================
92
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +000093*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +000094
95Core and builtins
96-----------------
97
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +000098- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +000099 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000100 comment at the end are still unsupported.
101
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000102Extension modules
103-----------------
104
105- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
106 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
107 than once. This has been fixed.
108
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000109- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
110 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
111 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
112 call.
113
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000114- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
115
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000116Library
117-------
118
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000119- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
120 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
121
122- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
123 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
124 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
125 restored.
126
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000127IDLE
128----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000129
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000130- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000131
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000132Build
133-----
134
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000135- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
136 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
137
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000138C API
139-----
140
141Windows
142-------
143
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000144- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
145 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
146
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000147- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
148
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000149Mac
150---
151
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000152- Various fixes to pimp.
153
154- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
155
156- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
157 more problems than it solves.
158
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000159
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000160What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
161=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000162
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000163*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
164
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000165Core and builtins
166-----------------
167
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000168- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
169 by sys.setcheckinterval().
170
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000171- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
172 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000173 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000174
175- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
176 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
177 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000178 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000179
180- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
181 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000182
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000183- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
184 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
185 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
186
187- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000188 770247.
189
190- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000191
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000192Extension modules
193-----------------
194
195- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
196 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
197
198- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
199
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000200- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
201
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000202- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
203 contained within the _strptime module.
204
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000205- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
206 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
207
208- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000209 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
210
211- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
212 the find_class attribute, if present.
213
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000214- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000215
216 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
217 (SF bug 763298).
218
219 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000220 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
221 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
222 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000223
224 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
225
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000226Library
227-------
228
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000229- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
230
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000231- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
232 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
233 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
234 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
235 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
236 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
237 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
238 or Tester().
239
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000240- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
241 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
242 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
243 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
244 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
245 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
246 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
247 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
248 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000249
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000250 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000251
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000252- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
253 weren't before was an oversight.
254
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000255- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
256 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
257
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000258- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
259 when there are no lines.
260
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000261- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
262 which could occur with Tk 8.4
263
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000264- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
265 to child processes.
266
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000267- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
268
269- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
270
271- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
272 xmlrpclib.
273
274- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
275 responses.
276
277- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
278 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
279
280- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
281 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
282 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
283
284- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
285 used as patterns.
286
287- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
288 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
289 than Tk 8.3.
290
291- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
292
293- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000294
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000295Tools/Demos
296-----------
297
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000298- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
299
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000300- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
301
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000302- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000303
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000304Build
305-----
306
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000307- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
308
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000309- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
310
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000311- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
312 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000313
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000314- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
315 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
316 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000317
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000318C API
319-----
320
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000321- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
322 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
323
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000324Windows
325-------
326
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000327- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
328 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
329 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
330 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
331 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
332 Python exception ::
333
334 thread.error: can't start new thread
335
336 is raised now.
337
338- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
339 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
340 instead of from DLL teardown.
341
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000342Mac
343---
344
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000345- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000346 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000347 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
348 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
349 the executable in the bundle.
350
351- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000352
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000353- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
354
355- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
356 on Panther.
357
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000358What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
359================================
360
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000361*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000362
363Core and builtins
364-----------------
365
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000366- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
367 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
368 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
369 with the -i option.
370
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000371- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
372 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
373
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000374- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
375 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
376
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000377- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
378 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
379 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
380 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
381 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
382 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
383 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
384 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
385 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
386 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
387 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
388 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
389 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000390
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000391- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
392 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
393 embedded in a lambda expression.
394
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000395- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
396 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
397 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
398 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
399 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
400
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000401- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
402 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
403 matches the restriction on classic classes.
404
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000405- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
406 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
407
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000408- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
409 It's writable again.
410
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000411- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
412 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
413 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000414 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000415
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000416- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
417 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
418 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
419
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000420Extension modules
421-----------------
422
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000423- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
424 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
425
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000426- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
427 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
428 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
429 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
430
431- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
432 collection.
433
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000434- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
435 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
436 unique within a single program run.
437
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000438- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
439 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
440
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000441- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
442 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
443
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000444- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
445 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000446
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000447- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
448
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000449- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
450 Fixes SF bug #730685.
451
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000452- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
453 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
454 for many BSD-derived systems.
455
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000456
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000457Library
458-------
459
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000460- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
461 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
462 primary ones:
463
464 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
465 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
466 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
467
468 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
469 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
470 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
471 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
472 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
473 framework features (which doctest lacks).
474
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000475- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
476 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
477 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
478 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
479 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
480 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
481 argument.
482
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000483- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
484 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
485 in the archive.
486
487- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
488 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
489
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000490- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
491 569574).
492
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000493- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
494 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
495 no more.
496
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000497- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
498 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
499 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
500 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
501 code coverage.
502
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000503- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
504 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
505 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000506 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
507 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000508
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000509- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
510 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
511 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000512 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000513
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000514- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
515
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000516- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
517 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
518 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
519 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
520
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000521- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
522 handling.
523
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000524- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
525 __doc__ of data descriptors.
526
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000527- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
528 in socket.py.
529
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000530- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
531
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000532- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
533 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
534 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
535 opener with proxy support.
536
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000537- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
538
539- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
540
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000541Tools/Demos
542-----------
543
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000544- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
545
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000546- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
547
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000548- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
549 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000550
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000551- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
552 files.
553
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000554Build
555-----
556
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000557- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000558 different root directory.
559
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000560C API
561-----
562
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000563- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
564 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
565 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
566 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
567 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
568 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
569 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
570 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
571 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
572 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
573
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000574- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
575 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
576 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
577 from Python.
578
579
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000580New platforms
581-------------
582
583None this time.
584
585Tests
586-----
587
588- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
589 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
590
591Windows
592-------
593
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000594- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
595
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000596- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
597 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
598 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
599 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
600 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
601 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
602 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
603 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
604 that's what it's for.
605
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000606Mac
607---
608
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000609- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
610 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
611 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
612 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000613- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
614 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
615- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000616
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000617SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
618------------------------------------
619
620430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
621598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
622622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
623661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
624683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
625697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
626713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
627724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
628727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
629729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
630730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
631731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
632732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
633733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
634735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
635740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
636744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
637745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
638747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
639749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
640751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
641753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
642755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
643757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
644760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
645
646
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000647What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
648================================
649
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000650*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000651
652Core and builtins
653-----------------
654
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000655- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
656 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
657
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000658- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
659 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
660 and cannot be strings).
661
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000662- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
663 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
664 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
665 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
666
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000667- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
668 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
669 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
670 Python itself.
671
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000672- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
673 the referenced object, if it has one.
674
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000675- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
676 the thread started at
677 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
678
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000679- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
680 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
681 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
682 placed on a list index.
683
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000684- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
685 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
686 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
687 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
688
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000689- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
690 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
691 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
692 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
693 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
694 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
695 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
696
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000697- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
698 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
699 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
700 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
701 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
702
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000703- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
704 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000705
706- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
707 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
708 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
709 #693195.)
710
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000711- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
712 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000713
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000714- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000715 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000716 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
717 interpreter executions, would fail.
718
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000719- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000720 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000721 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000722
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000723Extension modules
724-----------------
725
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000726- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
727 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
728 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
729 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
730
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000731- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
732 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
733
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000734- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
735 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
736 and Greg Chapman.)
737
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000738- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
739 recursively.
740
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000741- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000742 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
743 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
744 leaks.
745
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000746- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
747
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000748- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
749 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
750 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
751 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
752 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
753 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
754 #705836.
755
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000756- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000757 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
758
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000759- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
760 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
761 See SF bug #692416.
762
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000763- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
764 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
765
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000766- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
767 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
768 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000769
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000770- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000771 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
772 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
773
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000774- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
775 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
776 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
777 timeouts to work properly.
778
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000779Library
780-------
781
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000782- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
783 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
784 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
785 future release.
786
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000787- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
788 for querying platform dependent features.
789
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000790- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000791
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000792- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
793 pickle protocol versions.
794
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000795- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
796 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
797 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
798
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000799- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
800
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000801- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
802 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
803 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
804 modules.
805
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000806- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
807 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
808 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
809
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000810- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
811 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
812
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000813- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
814 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
815 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
816
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000817- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000818 MS Office extensions.
819
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000820- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
821 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
822
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000823- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
824 execution speed of expressions and statements.
825
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000826- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
827 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
828 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
829 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
830 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
831 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
832
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000833- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
834 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
835 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000836
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000837- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
838 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
839 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
840
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000841- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
842
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000843- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
844 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
845 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
846
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000847Tools/Demos
848-----------
849
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000850- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
851 See the module docstring for details.
852
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000853Build
854-----
855
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000856- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
857 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000858
859C API
860-----
861
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000862- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
863
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000864- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
865 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
866 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
867
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000868- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
869 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000870
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000871 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
872 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
873 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000874
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000875- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000876 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
877
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000878- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
879 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
880 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000881
882New platforms
883-------------
884
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000885None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000886
887Tests
888-----
889
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000890- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
891 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000892
893Windows
894-------
895
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000896- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
897 function.
898
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000899- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
900 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000901
902Mac
903---
904
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000905- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
906 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000907
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000908- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
909 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000910
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000911- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
912 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
913 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000914
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000915- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000916 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
917 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000918
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000919- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
920 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000921
922
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000923What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
924=================================
925
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000926*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000927
928Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000929-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000930
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000931- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
932 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
933 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
934
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000935- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
936 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
937 (SF patch #664376.)
938
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000939- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
940 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
941 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
942 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
943 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
944 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000945 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000946
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000947- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
948 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
949 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
950 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000951 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000952
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000953- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
954 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
955 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
956 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
957 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
958 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
959 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
960 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
961 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
962 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
963 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
964
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000965- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
966 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
967 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
968 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
969 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
970 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
971
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000972- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
973 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
974
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000975- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
976 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
977 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
978 case.)
979
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000980- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
981 passed as unicode strings.
982
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000983- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
984 See SF bug #683467.
985
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000986- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
987 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
988
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000989- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
990
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000991- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
992
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000993- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
994 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
995 arguments.
996
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000997- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
998 See SF bug #667147.
999
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001000- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001001 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001002 See SF bug #676155.
1003
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001004- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001005 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001006 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1007 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1008 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1009 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1010 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1011 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001012
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001013Extension modules
1014-----------------
1015
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001016- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1017 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1018 tp_as_number pointer.
1019
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001020- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1021 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1022 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1023 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1024 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1025
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001026- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1027
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001028- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1029
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001030- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001031 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001032 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1033 patch #678531.)
1034
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001035- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1036 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1037
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001038- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1039 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1040
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001041- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1042
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001043- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1044 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1045 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1046
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001047- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1048
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001049- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1050 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1051
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001052- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001053
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001054- datetime changes:
1055
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001056 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1057
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001058 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1059 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1060 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1061 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1062 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1063 now.
1064
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001065 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001066 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1067 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001068
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001069 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001070 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001071 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1072 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1073 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1074 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001075
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001076 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1077 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1078 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001079 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1080
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001081 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1082 by a later example coded by Guido.
1083
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001084 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001085 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1086 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1087 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001088 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1089 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1090
1091 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1092 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1093 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1094 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1095 tzinfo subclass instance.
1096
1097 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1098 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1099 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1100 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1101 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1102 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1103 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1104 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001105
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001106 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1107 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1108 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1109 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1110 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001111 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1112
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001113 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001114
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001115 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1116 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1117 as a naive datetime object.
1118
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001119 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1120 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1121 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1122
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001123 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1124 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1125 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1126 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1127 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1128 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1129 comparison.
1130
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001131 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1132 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1133 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1134 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001135 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001136
1137 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001138
1139 and ::
1140
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001141 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1142
1143 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1144 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1145 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1146 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1147
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001148 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1149 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1150 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1151 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1152 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1153
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001154 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1155 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001156 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1157 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001158
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001159Library
1160-------
1161
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001162- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1163 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1164
1165- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1166 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1167 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1168 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1169 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1170 See PEP 307 for details.
1171
1172- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1173 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1174
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001175- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1176 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001177 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001178 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1179 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001180 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001181
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001182- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1183 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1184
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001185- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1186 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1187 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1188
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001189- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1190
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001191- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1192 exception.
1193
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001194- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1195 class.
1196
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001197- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1198 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1199 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1200
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001201- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1202 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1203
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001204- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001205 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1206 See SF bug #659228.
1207
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001208- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1209 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1210 See SF patch #651082.
1211
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001212- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001213
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001214- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1215 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1216
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001217- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001218 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001219
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001220- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1221 DOS paths from other platforms.
1222
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001223Tools/Demos
1224-----------
1225
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001226- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1227 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1228 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1229 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1230 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1231 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1232 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1233 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1234 example:
1235
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001236 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1237 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001238
1239 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1240
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001241
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001242Build
1243-----
1244
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001245- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1246 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1247 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001248 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1249
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001250 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1251
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001252- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1253 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1254 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1255 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1256 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1257 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1258 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1259 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1260 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1261
1262- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1263 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1264 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1265 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1266
1267- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1268 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1269
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001270C API
1271-----
1272
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001273- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1274 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001275
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001276- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1277 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1278 tp_as_number pointer.
1279
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001280- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1281 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1282 (SF #681367)
1283
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001284- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1285 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1286 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1287 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001288
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001289Tests
1290-----
1291
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001292- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001293 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1294 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1295 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1296 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1297 pydoc.)
1298
1299- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1300
1301- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001302
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001303Windows
1304-------
1305
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001306- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1307 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1308 time).
1309
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001310- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1311 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1312
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001313- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1314 release without strong cryptography.
1315
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001316- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001317 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001318
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001319- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1320 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1321
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001322Mac
1323---
1324
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001325- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1326 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001327
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001328- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1329 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1330 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001331
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001332- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1333 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001334
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001335- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1336 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1337 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1338 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001339
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001340- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001341 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1342 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1343 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001344
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001345
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001346What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001347=================================
1348
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001349*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001350
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001351Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001352--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001353
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001354- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1355
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001356- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1357 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001358 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001359 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001360 a different meaning than before.
1361
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001362- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001363 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001364 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001365
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001366- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001367 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001368 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001369
1370- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1371 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1372 and deallocation.
1373
1374- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1375 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1376
1377- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1378 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1379 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1380 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1381 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1382
1383- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1384 now detected by the garbage collector.
1385
1386- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1387 [SF bug 519621]
1388
1389- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1390 identifier.
1391
1392- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1393 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1394 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1395 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1396 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1397 [SF bug 563060]
1398
1399- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1400 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1401 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1402 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1403 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1404
1405- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1406 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1407 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1408
1409- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1410
1411- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1412 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1413 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1414 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1415 state of the slots would be lost.)
1416
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001417Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001418-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001419
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001420- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001421 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1422 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1423 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1424 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001425 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1426 Jython 2.1.
1427
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001428- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001429 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001430 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1431 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1432 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1433 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1434 these, see PEP 302.
1435
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001436- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1437 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1438 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1439
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001440- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1441 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1442 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1443
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001444- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1445 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1446 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1447
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001448- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1449 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1450 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1451 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1452 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1453 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1454 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1455 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1456 releases or implementations.
1457
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001458- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001459 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1460 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001461
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001462- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1463 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1464
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001465- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1466 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1467 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1468
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001469- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1470 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1471
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001472- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1473 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001474 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1475 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001476
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001477- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1478 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1479 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1480 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1481 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1482
1483 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1484 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1485 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1486 pattern.
1487
1488 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1489 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1490 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1491 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1492
1493 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1494 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1495 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1496 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1497 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1498 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1499
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001500- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1501 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1502 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1503 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1504 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1505 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1506 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1507 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001508
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001509- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1510 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1511 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1512 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1513 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001514 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1515 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1516 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1517 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1518 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1519 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1520 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001521
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001522- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1523 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1524
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001525- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1526 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1527 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1528 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1529 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1530 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1531 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1532 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1533 to Zack Weinberg!
1534
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001535- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1536 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1537 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1538 type. This has been fixed now.
1539
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001540- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1541 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1542 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1543
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001544- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1545 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1546 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1547 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1548 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1549 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1550 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1551 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001552 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001553
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001554- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1555 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1556 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001557
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001558- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1559 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1560 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1561 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1562 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1563 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1564 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1565 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001566 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001567 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1568 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1569
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001570- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1571 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1572 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1573 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1574 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1575 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1576 this.)
1577
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001578- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1579 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001580 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001581 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001582 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1583 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001584 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1585 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001586
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001587- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1588 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1589 currently running.
1590
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001591- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1592 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1593 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1594 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1595
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001596- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1597 as directory names.
1598
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001599- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1600 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1601
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001602- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1603 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1604
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001605- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001606 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1607 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001608
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001609- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1610 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1611 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1612 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1613 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1614
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001615- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1616 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1617 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1618 removed.
1619
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001620- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1621 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1622 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1623
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001624- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1625 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1626 to __debug__.
1627
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001628- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1629 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1630 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1631
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001632- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1633 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1634 deprecated now.
1635
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001636- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1637 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1638 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001639
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001640- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1641 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1642 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1643 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1644 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001645
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001646- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1647 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1648
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001649- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1650 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1651 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001652 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001653 is backward compatible.
1654
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001655- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1656 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1657 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1658 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1659 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1660
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001661- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1662 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1663 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1664 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1665 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1666 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001667
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001668- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1669 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1670
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001671- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1672 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1673
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001674- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1675 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1676 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1677 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1678 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1679
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001680- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1681 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1682 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1683
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001684- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001685 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1686
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001687- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1688 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1689 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001690
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001691- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1692 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1693
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001694- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1695 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1696 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1697
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001698- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1699
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001700Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001701-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001702
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001703- Added three operators to the operator module:
1704 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1705 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1706 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1707
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001708- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1709
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001710- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1711 archives.
1712
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001713- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1714 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1715 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1716
1717 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1718
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001719- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1720 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1721 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001722 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001723
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001724- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1725 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1726 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1727 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001728 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1729 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1730 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1731 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001732
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001733- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1734 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001735
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001736- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1737
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001738- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1739 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1740
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001741- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1742 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1743 supported.
1744
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001745- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1746
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001747- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1748 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001749
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001750- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1751 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1752
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001753- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1754
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001755- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1756 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1757
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001758- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1759 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1760 functions but callable type objects.
1761
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001762- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001763 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001764 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001765
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001766- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1767 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001768
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001769- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1770 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001771
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001772- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1773 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1774 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1775 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1776
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001777- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1778 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001779
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001780- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1781 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1782 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1783 and __imul__.
1784
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001785- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001786 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1787 is called.
1788
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001789- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1790 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1791 interpreter was compiled.
1792
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001793- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1794 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1795 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001796 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001797 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1798 1, not 2.
1799
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001800- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1801 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1802 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1803 limit.
1804
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001805- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1806 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1807 bug #623464.
1808
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001809- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1810 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1811 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1812 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1813
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001814Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001815-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001816
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001817- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1818
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001819- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1820 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1821 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1822 with Python 2.3a2.
1823
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001824- os.path exposes getctime.
1825
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001826- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001827 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001828 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001829 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001830 unit tests of floating point results.
1831
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001832- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1833 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1834 has been increased.
1835
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001836- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1837 executed.
1838
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001839- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1840 postinstallation script.
1841
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001842- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1843 test the current module.
1844
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001845- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001846 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1847 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1848 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1849 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1850
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001851- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001852 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001853 Ward's Optik package.
1854
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001855- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1856 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1857 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1858 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1859
1860- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1861 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001862 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001863
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001864- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1865 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1866 shelf are binary pickles.
1867
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001868- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1869 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1870
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001871- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1872 modules are iterators now.
1873
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001874- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1875 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1876 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1877 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1878 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1879 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001880
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001881- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1882 with their entity value.
1883
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001884- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1885
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001886- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1887 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001888
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001889- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1890 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001891 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001892
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001893- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1894 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1895 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1896 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1897 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1898 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1899 main():
1900
1901 import locale
1902 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1903
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001904- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1905 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1906
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001907- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1908 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1909 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1910 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1911 to the new standard.
1912
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001913- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1914 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1915 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1916 an extension to the database.
1917
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001918- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1919 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1920 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1921 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001922 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001923
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001924- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001925 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001926
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001927- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1928 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1929 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1930 bounded integers.
1931
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001932- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1933 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1934 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1935 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1936 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1937 in existence.
1938
1939 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1940 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1941 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1942 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1943 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1944 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1945
1946 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1947 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1948 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1949 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1950
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001951- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1952 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1953 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1954
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001955- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1956
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001957- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1958 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1959 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1960 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1961
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001962- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1963 argument.
1964
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001965- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1966 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1967 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1968 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1969 [SF patch 560794].
1970
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001971- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1972 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1973 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001974 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1975 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1976 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001977
1978- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1979 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001980
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001981- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1982 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1983 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1984 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001985
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001986- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1987 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1988 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1989 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1990 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1991
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001992- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001993
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001994- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1995
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001996- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1997 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1998 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1999 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2000 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2001 identical to None.
2002
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002003- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2004 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2005 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2006 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2007 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2008 results now.
2009
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002010- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2011 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2012
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002013- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2014 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2015 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2016 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2017 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2018 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2019 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2020 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2021
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002022- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2023
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002024- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2025 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2026
2027- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2028 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2029 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2030 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2031 and other systems.
2032
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002033- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2034 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2035 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2036 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 +00002037 work well with these.
2038
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002039- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2040
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002041- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002042 connections.
2043
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002044- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2045 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2046 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2047
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002048- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2049 sets
2050
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002051- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2052 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2053 name.
2054
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002055- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2056 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2057 passed in.
2058
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002059- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002060 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002061 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2062 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002063
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002064- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2065
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002066- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2067
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002068- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2069 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2070 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2071
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002072- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2073 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2074 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2075 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002076 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002077
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002078- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002079 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002080 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002081
2082- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2083 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2084 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2085
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002086- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002087 the value of its expression argument.
2088
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002089- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2090 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2091 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2092
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002093- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2094 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2095 skipstone browser was included.
2096
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002097- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2098 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2099
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002100Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002101-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002102
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002103- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2104 names in addition to accepting file names.
2105
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002106- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2107 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2108 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2109 still used and useful.)
2110
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002111- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2112 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2113 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2114 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002115
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002116- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2117 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2118 the generated binary.
2119
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002120Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002121-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002122
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002123- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2124
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002125- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2126 except in the hands of experts.
2127
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002128- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002129 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2130 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2131 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002132
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002133- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2134 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2135 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2136 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2137 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2138 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2139 builds.
2140
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002141- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2142 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2143 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2144 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2145 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2146 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2147 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2148 new type.
2149
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002150- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002151
2152 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2153 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2154 positive infinities.
2155
2156 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2157 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2158 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2159 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2160 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2161 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2162 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2163
2164 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2165
2166 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2167
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002168- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2169 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2170 size of the executable.
2171
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002172- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2173 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2174 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2175 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002176
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002177- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2178
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002179- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2180 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2181 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002182
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002183- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2184 well as Unix.
2185
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002186- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2187 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2188 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2189 modules in the README file for details.
2190
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002191C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002192-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002193
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002194- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2195 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002196 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002197 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002198 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002199
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002200- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2201 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2202 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2203 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2204 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2205 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002206 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002207 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2208 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2209 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2210 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2211 aligned.)
2212
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002213- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2214 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2215 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2216
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002217- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2218 level.
2219
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002220- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2221 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2222 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2223 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2224 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2225
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002226- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2227 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2228 code.
2229
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002230- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2231 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2232 adjusting for negative indices.
2233
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002234- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2235 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2236 object.
2237
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002238- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2239 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2240 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2241
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002242- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2243 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002244
2245- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2246
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002247- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2248 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2249 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2250 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2251
2252- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2253
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002254- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002255
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002256- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002257 without going through the buffer API.
2258
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002259- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002260
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002261- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2262 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2263 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2264 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2265
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002266- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2267 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2268
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002269- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002270 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2271
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002272New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002273-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002274
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002275- OpenVMS is now supported.
2276
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002277- AtheOS is now supported.
2278
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002279- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2280
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002281- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2282
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002283Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002284-----
2285
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002286- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2287 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2288 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002289
2290Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002291-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002292
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002293- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2294 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2295 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2296 bugs.
2297 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002298 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002299 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2300 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002301 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002302
2303- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002304 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002305
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002306- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2307 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2308
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002309- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2310 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002311 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002312 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2313
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002314- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2315 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2316 use files" uninstall option).
2317
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002318- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2319
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002320- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2321 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2322
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002323- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2324 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2325 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2326
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002327- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2328 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2329 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2330 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2331 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002332 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2333 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2334 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002335
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002336- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002337 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002338 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2339 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2340 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2341 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2342 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2343 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2344 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2345 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2346 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2347 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2348 work around.
2349
2350- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2351 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2352 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2353 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2354 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2355 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2356 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2357 specified with O_CREAT too).
2358
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002359Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002360----
2361
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002362- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002363
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002364- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2365 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2366 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2367
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002368- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2369 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2370 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2371
2372- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2373 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2374 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2375 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2376 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2377 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2378 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2379 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002380
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002381- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2382 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2383 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002384
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002385- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2386 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2387 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2388 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2389 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002390
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002391- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2392 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2393 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002394
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002395- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2396 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002397
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002398- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2399 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2400 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2401 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2402 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002403
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002404- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2405 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2406 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2407
2408- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2409 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2410 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002411
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002412- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2413 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2414 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2415 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002416 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002417
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002418- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2419 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002420
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002421- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2422 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002423
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002424- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002425 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002426 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2427 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002428
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002429
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002430What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002431===============================
2432
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002433*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2434
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002435Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002436--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002437
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002438- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2439 with a custom metaclass.
2440
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002441Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002442-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002443
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002444- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2445 are proxies.
2446
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002447Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002448-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002449
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002450- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2451 very short strings.
2452
2453- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2454 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2455 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2456 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2457 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2458
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002459Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002460-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002461
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002462- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2463 close or delete time).
2464
2465- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2466 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2467
2468- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2469
2470- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002471 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002472
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002473Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002474-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002475
2476Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002477-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002478
2479C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002480-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002481
2482New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002483-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002484
2485Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002486-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002487
2488Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002489-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002490
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002491- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2492
2493- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2494 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2495
2496- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2497 deleted at process exit time.
2498
2499- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2500 in backslash.
2501
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002502Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002503----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002504
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002505- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2506 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2507 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2508
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002509
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002510What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002511===========================
2512
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002513*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2514
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002515Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002516--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002517
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002518- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2519 been extensively updated. See
2520
2521 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2522
2523 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2524
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002525- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2526 deleted!
2527
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002528- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2529 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2530 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2531 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2532 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2533
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002534- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2535
2536 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2537 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2538
2539 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2540 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2541 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2542 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2543 supported anyway.
2544
2545 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2546 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2547
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002548- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2549 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2550 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2551 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2552 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002553
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002554- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2555 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2556 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002558Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002559-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002560
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002561- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2562 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2563 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2564 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2565 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2566 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002567 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2568 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2569 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2570 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002571
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002572- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2573 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2574 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2575
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002576Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002577-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002578
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002579- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2580
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002581Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002582-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002583
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002584- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2585 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2586 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2587 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2588 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2589 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2590
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002591- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2592
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002593- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2594
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002595- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2596
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002597- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2598 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2599 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2600
2601- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2602
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002603Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002604-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002605
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002606- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2607 off a search on Google.
2608
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002609Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002610-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002611
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002612- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2613 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2614 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2615 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2616 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2617 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2618 other platforms should do likewise.
2619
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002620- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2621 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2622 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2623
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002624C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002625-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002626
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002627- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2628 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2629 producing key-value pairs.
2630
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002631- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002632 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002633 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2634 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2635 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2636 previously went unchallenged.
2637
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002638New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002639-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002640
2641Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002642-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002643
2644Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002645-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002646
2647Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002649
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002650- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2651 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002652
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002653- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2654 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2655 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2656 home.
2657
2658
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002659What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002660===========================
2661
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002662*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2663
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002664Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002665--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002666
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002667- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2668 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002669
2670 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002671 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002672
2673 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2674 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002675 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002676 This needs to be documented.
2677
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002678- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2679 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2680
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002681- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2682 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2683 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2684
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002685- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2686 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2687
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002688- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2689 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2690 class forbids it).
2691
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002692- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2693 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2694 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2695
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002696- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2697
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002698Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002699-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002700
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002701- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2702 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002703 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002704
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002705- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2706 (like 1 + '').
2707
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002708Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002709-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002710
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002711- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2712 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2713 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2714 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002715 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002716 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2717
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002718- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2719 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2720 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2721 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2722
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002723- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2724 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002725 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2726 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2727 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002728
2729- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2730 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002731
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002732- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2733 bytes on its input.
2734
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002735Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002736-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002737
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002738- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002739 convenience function.
2740
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002741- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2742 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2743 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002744 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2745 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2746 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2747 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2748 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2749 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002750
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002751- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2752 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2753 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2754 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2755
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002756- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2757 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2758 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2759
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002760- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2761 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2762 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2763 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2764
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002765- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2766 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002767 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002768 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2769 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2770 new -l and -e options.
2771
2772- statcache is now deprecated.
2773
2774- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2775 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002777 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2778 time properly taken into account.
2779
2780- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2781 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2782 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2783 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2784
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002785Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002787
2788Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002790
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002791- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2792 is built with libdb3 if available.
2793
2794- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2795
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002796C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002797-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002798
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002799- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2800 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2801 PySequence_Size().
2802
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002803- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2804
2805- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2806 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2807 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2808
2809- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2810 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2811
2812- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2813 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2814
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002815New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002817
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002818- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2819 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2820
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002821- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2822 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2823
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002824- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2825
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002826Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002828
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002829- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2830 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2831
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002832Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002833-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002834
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002835Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002836----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002837
2838- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2839 removed completely in the next release.
2840
2841- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2842 OSX.
2843
2844- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2845 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2846
2847- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2848
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002849
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002850What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002851===========================
2852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002853*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2854
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002855Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002857
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002858- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002859 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002860 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002861 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2862 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002863 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2864 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002865 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2866 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002867
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002868- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2869 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2870
2871- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2872 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2873
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002874Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002875-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002876
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002877- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2878 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2879 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2880 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2881 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2882 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2883 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2884 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2885
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002886- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2887 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2888 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2889 example).
2890
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002891- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002892 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002893 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002894 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002895
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002896- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2897 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2898 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002899 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002900
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002901- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2902 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2903 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2904 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2905 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2906 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2907
2908 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2909
2910 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2911
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002912Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002913-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002914
2915- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2916
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002917- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2918
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002919- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2920 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002921
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002922- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2923 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2924 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2925 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2926 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2927 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002928 attributes.
2929
2930- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2931 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2932 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002933
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002934- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2935 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2936 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002937
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002938- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2939 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2940 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002941 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2942 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2943
2944- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2945 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002946
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002947Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002949
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002950- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2951 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2952
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002953- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2954 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2955 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2956 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2957
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002958- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2959 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2960 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2961 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2962
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002963 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2964 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2965 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2966 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2967 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2968 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2969 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2970 without losing information).
2971
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002972- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002973 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2974 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2975 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2976 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2977 module).
2978
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002979 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002980 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2981 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2982 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2983 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002984
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002985- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002986 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2987 encoding.
2988
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002989- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2990 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2991
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002993 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2994
2995- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2996 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2997 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2998 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2999
3000- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3001
3002- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3003 ON, and OFF.
3004
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003005- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3006 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3007
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003008Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003009-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003010
3011- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3012 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3013 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003014
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003015- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3016 been added: -X and -E.
3017
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003018Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003020
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003021- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3022 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3023
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003024C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003026
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003027- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3028 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3029 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3030 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3031 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3032
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003033- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3034 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3035 as long) arguments.
3036
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003037- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3038 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3039 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3040 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3041 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3042 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3043
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003044- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3045 input.
3046
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003047New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003049
3050Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003051-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003052
3053Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003055
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003056- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3057 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3058 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3059
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003060- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3061 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3062 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003063 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003064
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003065 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3066 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3067 import signal
3068 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003069
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003071 while 1:
3072 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003073 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003074 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3075 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3076 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3077 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003078
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003079
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003080What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3081===========================
3082
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3084
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003085Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003086--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003087
3088- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3089 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3090 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3091
3092- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3093 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3094 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3095 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3096 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3097 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3098 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003099
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003100- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003101 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003102 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3103 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3104 associate a docstring with a property.
3105
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003106- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3107 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3108 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3109 other built-in object types.
3110
3111- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3112 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3113 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3114 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3115 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3116
3117- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3118 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3119
3120- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3121 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003122 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003123 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3124 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3125 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3126 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3127 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3128
3129- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3130 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3131 class.
3132
3133- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3134 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3135 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3136 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3137
3138- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3139 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3140 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3141 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3142
3143- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3144 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3145
3146- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3147 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3148 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3149 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3150 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003151 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003152 with the same value as s.
3153
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003154- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3155
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003156Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003158
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003159- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3160
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003161- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3162 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3163 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3164 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3165 objects.
3166
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003167- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3168 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003169 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3170 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3171
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003172- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3173 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3174 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3175
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003176Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003178
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003179- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3180 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3181 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3182 by the instances.
3183
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003184- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3185 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3186 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3187
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003188- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3189 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3190 before the entire comparison is complete.
3191
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003192- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3193 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3194 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3195
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003196- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3197 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3198 getwriter().
3199
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003200- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3201 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3202
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003203- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003204 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3205 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3206
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003207- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3208 iterable object.
3209
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003210- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3211 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003212
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003213- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3214 authentication.
3215
3216- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3217 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003218
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003219- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003220 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3221 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3222 a sample driver.)
3223
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003224Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003226
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003227- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3228 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3229 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3230 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3231 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3232 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3233 kernel has large file support.
3234
3235- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3236 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3237 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3238 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3239 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3240
3241- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3242 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3243 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3244
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003245C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003247
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003248- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3249 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3250
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003251New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003252-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003253
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003254- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3255 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3256
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003257Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003258-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003259
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003260- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3261 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3262 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3263 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3264 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3265
3266- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3267 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3268 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3269 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3270
3271- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3272 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3273
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003274Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003275-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003276
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003277- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003278 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3279 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003280
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003281
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003282What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3283===========================
3284
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3286
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003287Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003289
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003290- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3291 big to represent as a C double.
3292
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003293- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3294 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3295 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3296 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3297 restriction).
3298
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003299- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3300 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3301 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3302 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3303 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3304
3305 >>> dir([])
3306 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3307 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3308 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3309 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3310 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3311 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3312 'reverse', 'sort']
3313
3314 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3315
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003316- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003317 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3318 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3319 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3320 OverflowError exception.
3321
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003322- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003323 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003324 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3325 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3326 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3327 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3328 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003329 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3331 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3332
3333 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3334 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3335 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3336 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003337
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003338- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003339 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3340 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3341 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3342 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3343 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3344 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3345 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3346 once it is created.
3347
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003348- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3349 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3350 (key, value) pairs.
3351
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003352- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003353 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3354 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3355
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003356- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3357 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3358 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3359 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3360 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003361
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003362- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003363 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3364 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3365
3366 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3367
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003368- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003369 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3370
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003371Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003373
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003374- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003375 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3376 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003377
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003378- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3379 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3380 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3381 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3382 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3383 in this area anymore).
3384
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003385- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3386 threading.Timer.
3387
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003388- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3389 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3390
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003391- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003392 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3393
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003394- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003395 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3396 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3397 converted to Python longs.
3398
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003399- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003400 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3401
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003402- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3403 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3404 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3405
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003406Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003408
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003409- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3410 division operators as per PEP 238.
3411
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003412Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003414
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003415- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3416 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3417 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3418 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3419
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003420C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003422
3423- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003424
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003425- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3426 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003427 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003428
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3430 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003431 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003432 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003433
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003434- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003435 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3436 module:
3437
3438 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003439
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003440 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3441 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003442
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003443 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3444 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003445
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003446 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3447
3448 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3449
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003450- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003451 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3452 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3453 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003454
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003455New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003457
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003458- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3459 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3460 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3461 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3462 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003463
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003464Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003466
3467Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003468-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003469
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003470- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3471 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3472 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3473 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003474 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3475 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3476 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3477 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3478 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003479
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003480- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003481 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3482
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003483
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003484What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3485===========================
3486
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3488
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003489Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003491
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003492- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3493 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3494
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003495- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3496 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3497 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003498
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003499- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3500 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3501 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3502 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003503
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003504- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003506- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003507
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003508Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003510
3511- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003512 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003513 the module docstring for details.
3514
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003515Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003516-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003517
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003518- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003519 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3520 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3521 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003522
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003523- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3524 Nick Mathewson.
3525
3526Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003528
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003529- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3530 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3531 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3532 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3533 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3534 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3535 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3536 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3537
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003538- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3539 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3540 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3541 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3542
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003543- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3544 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3545 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3546 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3547 come a long way).
3548
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003549- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3550 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3551 write filters for these warnings).
3552
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003553- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3554 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3555 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3556 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3557 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3558
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003559- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3560 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3561 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3562 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3563 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3564 older distribution.
3565
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003566Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003568
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003569- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3570 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003571 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003572
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003573- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3574 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3575 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3576
3577- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3578
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003579- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3580
3581- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3582
3583- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003586
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003587- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3588
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003589New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003591
3592C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003594
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003595- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3596 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3597 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3598 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3599 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3600 against buffer overruns.
3601
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003602- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003603 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3604 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003605 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3606 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3607 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3608
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003609- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3610 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3611 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3612 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3613 deprecated.
3614
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003615Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003617
3618- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3619 relevant is found.
3620
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003621
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003622What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003623===========================
3624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3626
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003627Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003628----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003629
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003630- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3631 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3632 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3633 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3634 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3635 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3636 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3637 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003638 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003639 repaired.
3640
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003641- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003642 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003643 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3644 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3645 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3646 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3647 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3648 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3649 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3650 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3651
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003652- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3653 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3654 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3655 leading BMO character).
3656
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003657- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3658 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3659 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3660
3661 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3662 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3663 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003664
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003665 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3666 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3667 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3668 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3669 for various simple to use conversions.
3670
3671 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3672 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3673
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3675 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3676 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3677 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3678 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3679 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3680 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3681 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3682 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3683 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3684 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3685 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3686 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3687 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3688 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003689
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003690- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3691 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3692 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003693 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003694 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003695
3696 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003697 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3698 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3699 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3700 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3701 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003702 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3703 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003704
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003705 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3706 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3707 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003708 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003709
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003710- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3711 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3712 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3713 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3714 floating arithmetic,
3715
3716 x = 9007199254740992.0
3717 print long(x)
3718
3719 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3720 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3721 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3722 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3723 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3724 functions are of good quality).
3725
3726 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3727 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3728 algorithms to break.
3729
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003730- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3731 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3732 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3733 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3734 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3735 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3736 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3737 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3738 order.
3739
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003740- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3741 operation along the most common code paths.
3742
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003743- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3744 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3745
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003746- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3747 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3748 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3749 {}.update(UserDict())
3750
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003751- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3752 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3753 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3754 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3755 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3756 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3757 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3758 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3759
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003760- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003761 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003763 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003764 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3765 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003766 join() method of strings
3767 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003768 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3769 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003771 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003772
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003773- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3774 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3775
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003776- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3777 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3778
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003779- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3780 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3781 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3782 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3783
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003784- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3785 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003786 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003787 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3788 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003789
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003790- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3791
3792
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003793Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003795
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003796- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003797 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003798 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3799 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3800
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003801- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3802 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3803
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003804- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3805 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3806 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3807 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3808
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003809- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3810 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3811 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3812
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003813- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3814
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003815- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3816
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003817- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3818 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3819 that are still imported into string.py).
3820
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003821- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3822
3823- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3824 Now it does.
3825
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003826- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3827
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003828- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3829 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3830 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3831 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3832 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003833 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3834 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003835
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003836- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3837 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3838 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3839 'help(object)'.
3840
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003841Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003843
3844- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003845 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003846 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3847 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3848
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003849- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003850 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3851 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003852
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003853C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003855
3856- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3857 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858
3859----
3860
3861**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**