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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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000015- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
16 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
17 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
18 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
19
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000020- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
21 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
22 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
23 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
24 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000025
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000026- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
27 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
28
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000029Extension modules
30-----------------
31
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000032- Added socket.socketpair().
33
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000034Library
35-------
36
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000037- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
38 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
39 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
40 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
41 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
42 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
43 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
44 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
45 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
46 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
47 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
48 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
49 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
50
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000051Tools/Demos
52-----------
53
54Build
55-----
56
57C API
58-----
59
60Documentation
61-------------
62
63New platforms
64-------------
65
66Tests
67-----
68
69Windows
70-------
71
72Mac
73---
74
75
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000076What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
77=================================
78
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000079*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000080
81Core and builtins
82-----------------
83
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +000084- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
85 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
86 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
87 sensitive code.
88
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000089- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
90 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
91 @staticmethod
92 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000093 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000094
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000095- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
96 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
97 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
98 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
99 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
100 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
101 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
102 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
103 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
104 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
105 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
106
107 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
108 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
109 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
110 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
111 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
112 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
113 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
114
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000115- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
116 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
117
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000118- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000119 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000120
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000121- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000122 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000123 which was missing for no apparent reason.
124
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000125- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000126 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
127 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
128
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000129- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
130 types that support garbage collection.
131
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000132- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
133
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000134- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
135 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
136 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
137 Jython.
138
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000139- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
140
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000141- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
142 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
143
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000144- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
145 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
146 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000147
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000148- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
149 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
150 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
151
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000152Extension modules
153-----------------
154
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000155- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
156
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000157Library
158-------
159
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000160- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
161 TIS-620
162
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000163- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
164 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
165 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
166 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
167 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
168 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
169 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
170 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
171 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
172 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
173
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000174- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
175
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000176- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
177 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
178 same as when the argument is omitted).
179 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
180
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000181- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
182
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000183- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
184 schemes are offered.
185
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000186- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
187
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000188- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
189 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
190 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
191
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000192- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
193
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000194- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
195 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
196
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000197- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
198 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
199 when dummy_threading is being used.
200
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000201- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
202 from a tarfile.
203
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000204- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000205 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000206
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000207- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
208 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
209 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
210 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
211
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000212- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
213 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
214
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000215- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
216 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
217 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
218 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
219 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
220 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
221 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
222 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
223 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
224 by some other method in progress).
225
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000226- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
227 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
228 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000229
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000230- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
231
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000232- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
233 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
234 AM Kuchling.
235
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000236- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
237 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
238 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
239
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000240- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
241 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
242 instead of unsigned.
243
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000244- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000245 no longer part of the public API.
246
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000247- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
248 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
249 string methods of the same name).
250
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000251- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
252 SF patch 982681.
253
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000254- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000255 SF patch 945642.
256
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000257- doctest unittest integration improvements:
258
259 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
260
261 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
262 DocTestSuites.
263
264- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
265 that provide thread-local data.
266
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000267- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
268 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
269
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000270- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
271
272- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
273 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
274 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
275
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000276- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
277
278 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
279 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
280 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000281
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000282 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
283 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
284 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
285 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
286
287 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
288 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
289
290 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
291 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
292 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
293 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
294
295 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
296 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
297 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
298 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
299 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
300
301 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
302 wrapping help output.
303
304 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
305 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
306 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000307
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000308C API
309-----
310
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000311- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
312 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
313 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
314 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
315 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
316 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
317 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
318 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
319 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
320 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
321 its visible semantics have not changed.
322
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000323- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
324 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
325
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000326Documentation
327-------------
328
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000329- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000330
331 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000332 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000333
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000334 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000335
336 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
337
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000338- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000339
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000340Tests
341-----
342
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000343- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000344 platforms that use the Makefile.
345
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000346- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
347 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
348 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
349
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000350
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000351What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
352=================================
353
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000354*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000355
356Core and builtins
357-----------------
358
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000359- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
360 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
361 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
362 objects now (one object instead of three).
363
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000364- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
365 Windows DLLs.
366
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000367- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
368 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000369
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000370- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
371 a new .pyc magic.
372
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000373- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
374 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
375 be there.
376
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000377- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
378 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
379 the LC_NUMERIC category.
380
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000381- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
382 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
383 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
384
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000385- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
386
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000387- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
388 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
389 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000390
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000391- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
392 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
393
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000394- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
395
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000396- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000397 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000398
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000399- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
400
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000401- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
402
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000403- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
404 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
405
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000406- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
407 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
408 Fixes bug #858016 .
409
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000410- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
411 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
412 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
413
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000414- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
415 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
416 improves their performance (about 35%).
417
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000418- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
419 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
420 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
421
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000422- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
423 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
424 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
425 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
426
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000427- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
428 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
429 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
430 length is not known).
431
432- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
433 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000434 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
435 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000436 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
437
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000438- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
439 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
440
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000441- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
442 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
443 keyword arguments.
444
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000445- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
446 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
447 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
448
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000449- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
450 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
451 cases.
452
453- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
454 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
455 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
456 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
457 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
458 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
459 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
460 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
461 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
462 a release build.
463
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000464- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
465 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
466
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000467- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000468 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000469
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000470- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
471 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
472 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
473 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
474 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
475 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
476 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
477 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
478 destroyed.
479
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000480- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
481 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
482 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
483 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
484 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
485 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
486 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
487 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
488
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000489- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
490 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
491 character other than a space.
492
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000493- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
494 by the function object or by the method object, the function
495 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
496 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
497 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
498 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
499 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
500 attributes with the same name.
501
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000502- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
503 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
504 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
505 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
506 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
507 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
508 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
509 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
510 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
511 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
512 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
513 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
514 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
515 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000516
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000517- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
518 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
519 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
520 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
521 This has been repaired.
522
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000523- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
524
525- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
526
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000527- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
528 over a sequence.
529
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000530- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000531 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000532
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000533- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
534
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000535- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
536 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
537 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
538 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
539 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
540 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
541 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
542 records with equal keys is unchanged).
543
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000544- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
545 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
546 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
547
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000548- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
549 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
550 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
551 freelist.
552
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000553- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
554 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
555
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000556- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
557 number.
558
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000559- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
560 a TypeError exception.
561
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000562- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
563 820195.
564
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000565- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
566 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
567 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
568
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000569- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000570 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
571 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000572
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000573- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
574 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
575 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
576
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000577- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
578 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000579 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000580
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000581- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000582 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
583 the first call.
584
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000585
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000586Extension modules
587-----------------
588
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000589- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
590 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
591
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000592- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
593 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
594 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
595 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
596 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
597 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
598 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000599
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000600- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
601
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000602- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
603
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000604- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
605 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
606
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000607- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
608 fewer false positives.
609
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000610- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
611 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
612
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000613- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000614 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
615
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000616- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000617 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000618 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
619 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
620 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000621
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000622- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
623 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
624 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
625 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
626
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000627- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
628 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
629 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
630 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
631 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
632 #897625.
633
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000634- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
635 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
636
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000637- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
638 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
639 and pops on either side of the deque.
640
641- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
642 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
643
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000644- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
645 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
646 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
647 other functions that expect a function argument.
648
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000649- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
650
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000651- os.getsid was added.
652
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000653- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
654 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
655 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
656
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000657- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
658
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000659- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
660
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000661- readline.clear_history was added.
662
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000663- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
664
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000665- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
666
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000667- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
668
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000669- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
670
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000671- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
672
673- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
674
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000675- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
676
677- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
678
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000679- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
680 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
681 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
682
683- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
684 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
685 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
686 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
687 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
688 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
689 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
690
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000691- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
692 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
693 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
694 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000695
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000696- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000697 iterators from a single iterable.
698
699- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
700 of raising a TypeError exception.
701
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000702- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
703 as parameter.
704
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000705Library
706-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000707
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000708- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
709 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
710 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000711
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000712- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
713 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
714 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000715
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000716- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000717
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000718- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
719 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000720
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000721- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
722 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
723
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000724- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
725
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000726- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000727 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000728
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000729- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
730 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
731
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000732- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
733
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000734- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
735 on cygwin and mingw32.
736
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000737- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
738
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000739- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
740 module.
741
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000742- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
743 installation scheme for all platforms.
744
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000745- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000746 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000747
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000748- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
749 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
750 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
751
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000752- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
753 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
754 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
755
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000756- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
757
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000758- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
759
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000760- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
761 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
762
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000763- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
764 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
765 type pattern with the same value exists.
766
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000767- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
768 when run from the command prompt).
769
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000770- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
771 not taken into consideration when caching value.
772
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000773- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
774 default sort).
775
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000776- Added global runctx function to profile module
777
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000778- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
779
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000780- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
781
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000782- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
783
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000784- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000785 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
786 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
787 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
788 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
789 accordingly.
790
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000791- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
792 decoding standards.
793
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000794- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
795 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
796 called for all requests.
797
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000798- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
799 they are passed to the compiler.
800
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000801- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
802 indent, width and depth.
803
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000804- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
805 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
806
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000807- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
808 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
809
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000810- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
811
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000812- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
813
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000814- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
815
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000816- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
817 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
818
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000819- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000820 for better performance.
821
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000822- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000823
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000824- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
825 a string).
826
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000827- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
828
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000829- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
830
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000831- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
832
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000833- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
834
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000835- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
836 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
837 list of fieldnames.
838
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000839- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
840 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
841
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000842- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
843
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000844- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
845 empty lists.
846
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000847- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
848 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
849 and shelves.
850
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000851- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
852 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
853
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000854- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000855 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
856 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000857
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000858- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
859 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000860 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000861
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000862- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000863 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
864 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
865
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000866- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
867 and removed in Py2.4.
868
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000869- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
870
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000871- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
872
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000873Tools/Demos
874-----------
875
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000876- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
877 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
878
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000879- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
880
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000881- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
882 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
883 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
884 destination in situations where both files are given.
885
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000886- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
887 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
888 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
889 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
890
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000891- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
892
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000893- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
894 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
895 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
896 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
897 now.
898
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000899- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
900 in effect
901
902- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
903 C-c C-h
904
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000905- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
906 -d option was given.
907
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000908Build
909-----
910
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000911- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
912 build under OS X.
913
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000914- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
915 --enable-profiling.
916
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000917- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
918 is configured --with-tsc.
919
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000920- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
921 on AMD64.
922
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000923- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
924 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
925
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000926- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
927 removed.
928
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000929- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
930 supported (see PEP 11).
931
932- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
933
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000934- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
935
936- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
937 (see PEP 11).
938
939- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
940 sizeof(char) must be 1.
941
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000942C API
943-----
944
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000945- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
946 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
947 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
948
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000949- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
950 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
951 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
952 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
953
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000954- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
955 generator objects.
956
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000957- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
958 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000959 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
960 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000961
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000962- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
963 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
964
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000965- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
966 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
967 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
968 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
969 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
970
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000971- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
972 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
973 about 10% faster.
974
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000975- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
976 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
977
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000978- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
979 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
980 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
981 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
982
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000983Windows
984-------
985
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000986- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
987 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
988 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
989 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
990
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000991- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
992 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
993 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
994
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000995
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000996What's New in Python 2.3 final?
997===============================
998
999*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1000
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001001IDLE
1002----
1003
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001004- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1005 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1006 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1007 context-menu actions.
1008
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001009- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1010 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1011 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1012 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1013 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1014 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1015 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1016 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1017 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1018
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001019
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001020What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1021=============================================
1022
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001023*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001024
1025Core and builtins
1026-----------------
1027
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001028- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001029 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001030 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1031
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001032Extension modules
1033-----------------
1034
1035- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1036 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1037 than once. This has been fixed.
1038
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001039- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1040 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1041 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1042 call.
1043
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001044- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1045
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001046Library
1047-------
1048
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001049- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1050 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1051
1052- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1053 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1054 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1055 restored.
1056
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001057IDLE
1058----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001059
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001060- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001061
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001062Build
1063-----
1064
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001065- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1066 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1067
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001068C API
1069-----
1070
1071Windows
1072-------
1073
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001074- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1075 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1076
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001077- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1078
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001079Mac
1080---
1081
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001082- Various fixes to pimp.
1083
1084- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1085
1086- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1087 more problems than it solves.
1088
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001089
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001090What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1091=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001092
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001093*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1094
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001095Core and builtins
1096-----------------
1097
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001098- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1099 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1100
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001101- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1102 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001103 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001104
1105- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1106 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1107 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001108 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001109
1110- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1111 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001112
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001113- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1114 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1115 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1116
1117- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001118 770247.
1119
1120- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001121
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001122Extension modules
1123-----------------
1124
1125- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1126 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1127
1128- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1129
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001130- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1131
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001132- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1133 contained within the _strptime module.
1134
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001135- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1136 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1137
1138- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001139 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1140
1141- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1142 the find_class attribute, if present.
1143
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001144- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001145
1146 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1147 (SF bug 763298).
1148
1149 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001150 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1151 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1152 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001153
1154 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1155
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001156Library
1157-------
1158
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001159- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1160
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001161- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1162 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1163 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1164 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1165 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1166 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1167 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1168 or Tester().
1169
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001170- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1171 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1172 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1173 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1174 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1175 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1176 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1177 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1178 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001179
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001180 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001181
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001182- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1183 weren't before was an oversight.
1184
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001185- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1186 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1187
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001188- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1189 when there are no lines.
1190
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001191- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1192 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1193
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001194- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1195 to child processes.
1196
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001197- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1198
1199- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1200
1201- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1202 xmlrpclib.
1203
1204- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1205 responses.
1206
1207- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1208 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1209
1210- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1211 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1212 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1213
1214- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1215 used as patterns.
1216
1217- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1218 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1219 than Tk 8.3.
1220
1221- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1222
1223- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001224
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001225Tools/Demos
1226-----------
1227
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001228- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1229
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001230- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1231
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001232- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001233
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001234Build
1235-----
1236
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001237- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1238
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001239- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1240
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001241- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1242 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001243
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001244- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1245 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1246 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001247
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001248C API
1249-----
1250
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001251- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1252 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1253
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001254Windows
1255-------
1256
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001257- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1258 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1259 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1260 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1261 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1262 Python exception ::
1263
1264 thread.error: can't start new thread
1265
1266 is raised now.
1267
1268- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1269 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1270 instead of from DLL teardown.
1271
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001272Mac
1273---
1274
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001275- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001276 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001277 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1278 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1279 the executable in the bundle.
1280
1281- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001282
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001283- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1284
1285- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1286 on Panther.
1287
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001288What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1289================================
1290
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001291*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001292
1293Core and builtins
1294-----------------
1295
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001296- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1297 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1298 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1299 with the -i option.
1300
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001301- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1302 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1303
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001304- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1305 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1306
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001307- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1308 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1309 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1310 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1311 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1312 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1313 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1314 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1315 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1316 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1317 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1318 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1319 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001320
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001321- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1322 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1323 embedded in a lambda expression.
1324
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001325- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1326 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1327 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1328 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1329 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1330
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001331- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1332 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1333 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1334
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001335- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1336 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1337
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001338- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1339 It's writable again.
1340
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001341- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1342 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1343 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001344 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001345
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001346- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1347 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1348 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1349
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001350Extension modules
1351-----------------
1352
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001353- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1354 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1355
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001356- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1357 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1358 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1359 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1360
1361- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1362 collection.
1363
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001364- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1365 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1366 unique within a single program run.
1367
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001368- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1369 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1370
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001371- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1372 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1373
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001374- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1375 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001376
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001377- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1378
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001379- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1380 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1381
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001382- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1383 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1384 for many BSD-derived systems.
1385
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001386
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001387Library
1388-------
1389
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001390- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1391 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1392 primary ones:
1393
1394 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1395 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1396 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1397
1398 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1399 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1400 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1401 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1402 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1403 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1404
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001405- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1406 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1407 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1408 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1409 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1410 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1411 argument.
1412
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001413- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1414 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1415 in the archive.
1416
1417- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1418 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1419
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001420- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1421 569574).
1422
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001423- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1424 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1425 no more.
1426
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001427- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1428 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1429 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1430 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1431 code coverage.
1432
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001433- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1434 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1435 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001436 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1437 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001438
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001439- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1440 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1441 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001442 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001443
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001444- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1445
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001446- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1447 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1448 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1449 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1450
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001451- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1452 handling.
1453
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001454- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1455 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1456
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001457- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1458 in socket.py.
1459
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001460- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1461
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001462- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1463 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1464 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1465 opener with proxy support.
1466
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001467- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1468
1469- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1470
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001471Tools/Demos
1472-----------
1473
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001474- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1475
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001476- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1477
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001478- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1479 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001480
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001481- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1482 files.
1483
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001484Build
1485-----
1486
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001487- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001488 different root directory.
1489
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001490C API
1491-----
1492
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001493- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1494 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1495 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1496 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1497 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1498 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1499 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1500 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1501 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1502 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1503
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001504- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1505 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1506 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1507 from Python.
1508
1509
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001510New platforms
1511-------------
1512
1513None this time.
1514
1515Tests
1516-----
1517
1518- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1519 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1520
1521Windows
1522-------
1523
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001524- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1525
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001526- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1527 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1528 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1529 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1530 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1531 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1532 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1533 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1534 that's what it's for.
1535
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001536Mac
1537---
1538
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001539- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1540 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1541 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1542 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001543- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1544 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1545- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001546
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001547SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1548------------------------------------
1549
1550430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1551598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1552622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1553661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1554683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1555697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1556713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1557724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1558727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1559729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1560730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1561731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1562732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1563733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1564735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1565740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1566744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1567745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1568747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1569749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1570751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1571753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1572755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1573757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1574760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1575
1576
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001577What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1578================================
1579
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001580*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001581
1582Core and builtins
1583-----------------
1584
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001585- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1586 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1587
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001588- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1589 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1590 and cannot be strings).
1591
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001592- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1593 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1594 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1595 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1596
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001597- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1598 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1599 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1600 Python itself.
1601
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001602- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1603 the referenced object, if it has one.
1604
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001605- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1606 the thread started at
1607 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1608
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001609- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1610 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1611 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1612 placed on a list index.
1613
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001614- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1615 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1616 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1617 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1618
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001619- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1620 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1621 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1622 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1623 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1624 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1625 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1626
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001627- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1628 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1629 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1630 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1631 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1632
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001633- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1634 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001635
1636- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1637 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1638 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1639 #693195.)
1640
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001641- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1642 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001643
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001644- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001645 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001646 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1647 interpreter executions, would fail.
1648
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001649- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001650 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001651 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001652
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001653Extension modules
1654-----------------
1655
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001656- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1657 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1658 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1659 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1660
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001661- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1662 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1663
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001664- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1665 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1666 and Greg Chapman.)
1667
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001668- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1669 recursively.
1670
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001671- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001672 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1673 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1674 leaks.
1675
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001676- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1677
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001678- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1679 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1680 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1681 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1682 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1683 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1684 #705836.
1685
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001686- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001687 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1688
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001689- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1690 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1691 See SF bug #692416.
1692
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001693- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1694 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1695
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001696- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1697 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1698 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001699
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001700- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001701 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1702 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1703
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001704- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1705 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1706 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1707 timeouts to work properly.
1708
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001709Library
1710-------
1711
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001712- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1713 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1714 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1715 future release.
1716
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001717- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1718 for querying platform dependent features.
1719
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001720- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001721
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001722- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1723 pickle protocol versions.
1724
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001725- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1726 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1727 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1728
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001729- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1730
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001731- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1732 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1733 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1734 modules.
1735
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001736- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1737 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1738 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1739
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001740- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1741 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1742
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001743- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1744 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1745 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1746
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001747- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001748 MS Office extensions.
1749
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001750- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1751 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1752
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001753- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1754 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1755
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001756- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1757 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1758 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1759 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1760 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1761 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1762
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001763- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1764 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1765 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001766
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001767- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1768 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1769 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1770
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001771- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1772
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001773- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1774 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1775 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1776
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001777Tools/Demos
1778-----------
1779
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001780- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1781 See the module docstring for details.
1782
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001783Build
1784-----
1785
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001786- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1787 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001788
1789C API
1790-----
1791
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001792- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1793
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001794- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1795 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1796 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1797
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001798- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1799 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001800
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001801 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1802 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1803 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001804
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001805- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001806 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1807
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001808- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1809 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1810 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001811
1812New platforms
1813-------------
1814
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001815None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001816
1817Tests
1818-----
1819
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001820- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1821 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001822
1823Windows
1824-------
1825
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001826- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1827 function.
1828
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001829- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1830 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001831
1832Mac
1833---
1834
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001835- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1836 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001837
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001838- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1839 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001840
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001841- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1842 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1843 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001844
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001845- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001846 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1847 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001848
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001849- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1850 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001851
1852
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001853What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1854=================================
1855
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001856*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001857
1858Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001859-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001860
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001861- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1862 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1863 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1864
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001865- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1866 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1867 (SF patch #664376.)
1868
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001869- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1870 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1871 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1872 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1873 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1874 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001875 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001876
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001877- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1878 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1879 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1880 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001881 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001882
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001883- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1884 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1885 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1886 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1887 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1888 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1889 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1890 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1891 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1892 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1893 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1894
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001895- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1896 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1897 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1898 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1899 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1900 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1901
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001902- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1903 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1904
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001905- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1906 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1907 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1908 case.)
1909
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001910- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1911 passed as unicode strings.
1912
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001913- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1914 See SF bug #683467.
1915
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001916- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1917 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1918
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001919- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1920
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001921- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1922
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001923- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1924 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1925 arguments.
1926
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001927- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1928 See SF bug #667147.
1929
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001930- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001931 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001932 See SF bug #676155.
1933
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001934- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001935 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001936 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1937 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1938 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1939 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1940 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1941 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001942
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001943Extension modules
1944-----------------
1945
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001946- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1947 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1948 tp_as_number pointer.
1949
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001950- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1951 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1952 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1953 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1954 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1955
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001956- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1957
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001958- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1959
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001960- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001961 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001962 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1963 patch #678531.)
1964
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001965- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1966 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1967
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001968- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1969 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1970
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001971- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1972
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001973- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1974 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1975 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1976
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001977- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1978
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001979- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1980 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1981
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001982- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001983
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001984- datetime changes:
1985
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001986 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1987
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001988 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1989 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1990 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1991 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1992 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1993 now.
1994
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001995 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001996 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1997 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001998
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001999 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002000 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002001 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2002 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2003 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2004 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002005
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002006 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2007 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2008 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002009 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2010
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002011 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2012 by a later example coded by Guido.
2013
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002014 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002015 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2016 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2017 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002018 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2019 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2020
2021 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2022 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2023 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2024 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2025 tzinfo subclass instance.
2026
2027 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2028 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2029 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2030 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2031 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2032 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2033 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2034 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002035
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002036 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2037 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2038 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2039 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2040 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002041 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2042
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002043 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002044
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002045 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2046 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2047 as a naive datetime object.
2048
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002049 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2050 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2051 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2052
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002053 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2054 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2055 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2056 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2057 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2058 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2059 comparison.
2060
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002061 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2062 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2063 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2064 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002065 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002066
2067 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002068
2069 and ::
2070
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002071 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2072
2073 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2074 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2075 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2076 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2077
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002078 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2079 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2080 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2081 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2082 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2083
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002084 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2085 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002086 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2087 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002088
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002089Library
2090-------
2091
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002092- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2093 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2094
2095- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2096 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2097 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2098 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2099 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2100 See PEP 307 for details.
2101
2102- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2103 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2104
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002105- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2106 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002107 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002108 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2109 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002110 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002111
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002112- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2113 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2114
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002115- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2116 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2117 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2118
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002119- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2120
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002121- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2122 exception.
2123
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002124- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2125 class.
2126
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002127- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2128 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2129 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2130
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002131- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2132 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2133
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002134- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002135 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2136 See SF bug #659228.
2137
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002138- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2139 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2140 See SF patch #651082.
2141
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002142- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002143
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002144- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2145 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2146
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002147- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002148 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002149
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002150- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2151 DOS paths from other platforms.
2152
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002153Tools/Demos
2154-----------
2155
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002156- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2157 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2158 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2159 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2160 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2161 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2162 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2163 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2164 example:
2165
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002166 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2167 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002168
2169 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2170
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002171
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002172Build
2173-----
2174
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002175- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2176 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2177 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002178 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2179
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002180 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2181
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002182- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2183 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2184 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2185 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2186 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2187 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2188 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2189 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2190 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2191
2192- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2193 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2194 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2195 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2196
2197- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2198 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2199
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002200C API
2201-----
2202
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002203- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2204 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002205
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002206- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2207 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2208 tp_as_number pointer.
2209
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002210- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2211 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2212 (SF #681367)
2213
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002214- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2215 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2216 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2217 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002218
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002219Tests
2220-----
2221
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002222- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002223 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2224 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2225 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2226 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2227 pydoc.)
2228
2229- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2230
2231- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002232
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002233Windows
2234-------
2235
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002236- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2237 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2238 time).
2239
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002240- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2241 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2242
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002243- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2244 release without strong cryptography.
2245
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002246- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002247 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002248
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002249- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2250 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2251
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002252Mac
2253---
2254
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002255- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2256 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002257
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002258- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2259 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2260 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002261
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002262- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2263 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002264
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002265- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2266 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2267 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2268 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002269
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002270- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002271 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2272 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2273 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002274
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002276What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002277=================================
2278
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002279*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002281Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002282--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002283
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002284- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2285
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002286- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2287 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002288 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002289 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002290 a different meaning than before.
2291
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002292- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002293 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002294 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002295
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002296- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002297 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002298 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002299
2300- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2301 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2302 and deallocation.
2303
2304- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2305 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2306
2307- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2308 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2309 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2310 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2311 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2312
2313- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2314 now detected by the garbage collector.
2315
2316- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2317 [SF bug 519621]
2318
2319- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2320 identifier.
2321
2322- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2323 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2324 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2325 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2326 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2327 [SF bug 563060]
2328
2329- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2330 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2331 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2332 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2333 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2334
2335- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2336 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2337 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2338
2339- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2340
2341- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2342 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2343 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2344 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2345 state of the slots would be lost.)
2346
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002347Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002348-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002349
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002350- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002351 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2352 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2353 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2354 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002355 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2356 Jython 2.1.
2357
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002358- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002359 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002360 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2361 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2362 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2363 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2364 these, see PEP 302.
2365
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002366- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2367 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2368 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2369
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002370- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2371 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2372 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2373
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002374- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2375 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2376 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2377
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002378- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2379 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2380 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2381 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2382 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2383 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2384 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2385 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2386 releases or implementations.
2387
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002388- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002389 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2390 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002391
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002392- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2393 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2394
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002395- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2396 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2397 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2398
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002399- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2400 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2401
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002402- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2403 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002404 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2405 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002406
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002407- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2408 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2409 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2410 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2411 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2412
2413 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2414 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2415 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2416 pattern.
2417
2418 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2419 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2420 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2421 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2422
2423 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2424 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2425 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2426 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2427 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2428 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2429
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002430- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2431 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2432 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2433 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2434 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2435 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2436 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2437 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002438
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002439- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2440 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2441 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2442 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2443 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002444 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2445 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2446 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2447 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2448 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2449 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2450 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002451
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002452- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2453 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2454
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002455- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2456 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2457 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2458 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2459 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2460 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2461 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2462 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2463 to Zack Weinberg!
2464
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002465- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2466 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2467 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2468 type. This has been fixed now.
2469
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002470- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2471 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2472 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2473
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002474- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2475 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2476 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2477 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2478 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2479 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2480 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2481 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002482 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002483
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002484- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2485 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2486 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002487
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002488- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2489 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2490 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2491 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2492 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2493 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2494 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2495 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002496 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002497 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2498 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2499
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002500- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2501 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2502 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2503 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2504 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2505 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2506 this.)
2507
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002508- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2509 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002510 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002511 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002512 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2513 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002514 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2515 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002516
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002517- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2518 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2519 currently running.
2520
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002521- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2522 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2523 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2524 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2525
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002526- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2527 as directory names.
2528
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002529- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2530 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2531
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002532- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2533 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2534
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002535- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002536 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2537 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002538
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002539- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2540 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2541 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2542 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2543 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2544
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002545- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2546 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2547 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2548 removed.
2549
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002550- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2551 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2552 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2553
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002554- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2555 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2556 to __debug__.
2557
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002558- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2559 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2560 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2561
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002562- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2563 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2564 deprecated now.
2565
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002566- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2567 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2568 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002569
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002570- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2571 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2572 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2573 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2574 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002575
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002576- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2577 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2578
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002579- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2580 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2581 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002582 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002583 is backward compatible.
2584
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002585- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2586 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2587 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2588 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2589 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2590
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002591- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2592 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2593 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2594 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2595 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2596 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002597
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002598- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2599 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2600
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002601- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2602 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2603
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002604- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2605 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2606 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2607 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2608 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2609
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002610- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2611 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2612 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2613
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002614- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002615 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2616
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002617- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2618 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2619 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002620
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002621- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2622 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2623
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002624- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2625 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2626 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2627
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002628- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2629
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002630Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002631-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002632
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002633- Added three operators to the operator module:
2634 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2635 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2636 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2637
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002638- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2639
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002640- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2641 archives.
2642
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002643- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2644 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2645 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2646
2647 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2648
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002649- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2650 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2651 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002652 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002653
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002654- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2655 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2656 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2657 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002658 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2659 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2660 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2661 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002662
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002663- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2664 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002665
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002666- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2667
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002668- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2669 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2670
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002671- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2672 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2673 supported.
2674
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002675- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2676
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002677- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2678 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002679
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002680- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2681 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2682
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002683- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2684
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002685- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2686 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2687
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002688- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2689 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2690 functions but callable type objects.
2691
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002692- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002693 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002694 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002695
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002696- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2697 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002698
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002699- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2700 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002701
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002702- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2703 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2704 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2705 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2706
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002707- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2708 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002709
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002710- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2711 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2712 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2713 and __imul__.
2714
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002715- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002716 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2717 is called.
2718
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002719- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2720 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2721 interpreter was compiled.
2722
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002723- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2724 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2725 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002726 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002727 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2728 1, not 2.
2729
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002730- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2731 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2732 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2733 limit.
2734
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002735- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2736 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2737 bug #623464.
2738
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002739- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2740 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2741 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2742 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2743
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002744Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002745-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002746
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002747- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2748
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002749- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2750 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2751 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2752 with Python 2.3a2.
2753
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002754- os.path exposes getctime.
2755
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002756- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002757 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002758 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002759 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002760 unit tests of floating point results.
2761
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002762- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2763 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2764 has been increased.
2765
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002766- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2767 executed.
2768
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002769- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2770 postinstallation script.
2771
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002772- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2773 test the current module.
2774
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002775- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002776 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2777 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2778 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2779 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2780
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002781- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002782 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002783 Ward's Optik package.
2784
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002785- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2786 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2787 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2788 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2789
2790- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2791 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002792 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002793
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002794- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2795 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2796 shelf are binary pickles.
2797
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002798- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2799 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2800
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002801- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2802 modules are iterators now.
2803
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002804- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2805 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2806 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2807 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2808 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2809 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002810
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002811- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2812 with their entity value.
2813
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002814- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2815
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002816- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2817 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002818
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002819- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2820 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002821 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002822
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002823- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2824 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2825 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2826 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2827 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2828 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2829 main():
2830
2831 import locale
2832 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2833
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002834- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2835 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2836
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002837- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2838 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2839 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2840 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2841 to the new standard.
2842
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002843- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2844 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2845 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2846 an extension to the database.
2847
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002848- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2849 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2850 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2851 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002852 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002853
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002854- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002855 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002856
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002857- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2858 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2859 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2860 bounded integers.
2861
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002862- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2863 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2864 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2865 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2866 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2867 in existence.
2868
2869 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2870 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2871 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2872 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2873 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2874 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2875
2876 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2877 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2878 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2879 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2880
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002881- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2882 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2883 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2884
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002885- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2886
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002887- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2888 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2889 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2890 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2891
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002892- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2893 argument.
2894
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002895- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2896 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2897 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2898 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2899 [SF patch 560794].
2900
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002901- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2902 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2903 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002904 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2905 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2906 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002907
2908- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2909 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002910
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002911- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2912 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2913 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2914 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002915
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002916- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2917 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2918 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2919 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2920 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2921
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002922- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002923
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002924- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2925
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002926- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2927 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2928 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2929 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2930 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2931 identical to None.
2932
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002933- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2934 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2935 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2936 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2937 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2938 results now.
2939
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002940- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2941 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2942
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002943- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2944 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2945 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2946 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2947 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2948 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2949 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2950 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2951
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002952- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2953
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002954- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2955 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2956
2957- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2958 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2959 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2960 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2961 and other systems.
2962
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002963- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2964 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2965 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2966 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 +00002967 work well with these.
2968
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002969- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2970
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002971- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002972 connections.
2973
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002974- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2975 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2976 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2977
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002978- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2979 sets
2980
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002981- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2982 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2983 name.
2984
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002985- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2986 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2987 passed in.
2988
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002989- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002990 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002991 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2992 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002993
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002994- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2995
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002996- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2997
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002998- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2999 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3000 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3001
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003002- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3003 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3004 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3005 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003006 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003007
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003008- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003009 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003010 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003011
3012- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3013 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3014 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3015
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003016- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003017 the value of its expression argument.
3018
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003019- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3020 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3021 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3022
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003023- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3024 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3025 skipstone browser was included.
3026
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003027- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3028 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3029
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003030Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003031-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003032
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003033- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3034 names in addition to accepting file names.
3035
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003036- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3037 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3038 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3039 still used and useful.)
3040
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003041- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3042 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3043 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3044 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003045
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003046- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3047 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3048 the generated binary.
3049
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003050Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003051-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003052
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003053- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3054
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003055- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3056 except in the hands of experts.
3057
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003058- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003059 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3060 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3061 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003062
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003063- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3064 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3065 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3066 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3067 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3068 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3069 builds.
3070
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003071- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3072 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3073 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3074 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3075 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3076 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3077 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3078 new type.
3079
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003080- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003081
3082 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3083 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3084 positive infinities.
3085
3086 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3087 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3088 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3089 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3090 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3091 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3092 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3093
3094 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3095
3096 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3097
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003098- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3099 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3100 size of the executable.
3101
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003102- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3103 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3104 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3105 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003106
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003107- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3108
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003109- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3110 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3111 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003112
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003113- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3114 well as Unix.
3115
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003116- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3117 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3118 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3119 modules in the README file for details.
3120
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003121C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003122-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003123
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003124- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3125 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003126 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003127 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003128 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003129
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003130- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3131 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3132 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3133 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3134 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3135 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003136 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003137 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3138 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3139 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3140 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3141 aligned.)
3142
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003143- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3144 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3145 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3146
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003147- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3148 level.
3149
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003150- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3151 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3152 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3153 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3154 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3155
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003156- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3157 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3158 code.
3159
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003160- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3161 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3162 adjusting for negative indices.
3163
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003164- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3165 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3166 object.
3167
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003168- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3169 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3170 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3171
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003172- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3173 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003174
3175- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3176
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003177- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3178 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3179 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3180 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3181
3182- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3183
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003184- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003185
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003186- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003187 without going through the buffer API.
3188
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003190
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003191- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3192 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3193 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3194 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3195
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003196- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3197 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3198
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003199- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003200 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3201
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003202New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003203-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003204
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003205- OpenVMS is now supported.
3206
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003207- AtheOS is now supported.
3208
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003209- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3210
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003211- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3212
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003213Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003214-----
3215
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003216- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3217 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3218 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003219
3220Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003221-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003222
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003223- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3224 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3225 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3226 bugs.
3227 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003228 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003229 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3230 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003231 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003232
3233- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003234 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003235
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003236- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3237 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3238
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003239- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3240 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003241 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003242 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3243
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003244- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3245 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3246 use files" uninstall option).
3247
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003248- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3249
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003250- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3251 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3252
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003253- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3254 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3255 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3256
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003257- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3258 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3259 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3260 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3261 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003262 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3263 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3264 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003265
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003266- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003267 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003268 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3269 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3270 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3271 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3272 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3273 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3274 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3275 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3276 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3277 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3278 work around.
3279
3280- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3281 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3282 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3283 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3284 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3285 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3286 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3287 specified with O_CREAT too).
3288
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003289Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290----
3291
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003292- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003293
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003294- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3295 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3296 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3297
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003298- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3299 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3300 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3301
3302- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3303 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3304 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3305 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3306 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3307 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3308 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3309 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003310
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003311- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3312 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3313 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003314
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003315- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3316 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3317 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3318 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3319 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003320
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003321- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3322 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3323 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003324
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003325- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3326 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003327
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003328- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3329 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3330 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3331 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3332 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003333
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003334- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3335 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3336 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3337
3338- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3339 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3340 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003341
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003342- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3343 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3344 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3345 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003346 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003347
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003348- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3349 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003350
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003351- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3352 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003353
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003354- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003355 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003356 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3357 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003358
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003359
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003360What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003361===============================
3362
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3364
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003365Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003367
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003368- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3369 with a custom metaclass.
3370
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003371Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003373
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003374- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3375 are proxies.
3376
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003377Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003379
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003380- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3381 very short strings.
3382
3383- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3384 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3385 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3386 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3387 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3388
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003389Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003391
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003392- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3393 close or delete time).
3394
3395- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3396 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3397
3398- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3399
3400- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003401 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003402
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003403Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003405
3406Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003408
3409C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003411
3412New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003414
3415Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003417
3418Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003420
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003421- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3422
3423- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3424 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3425
3426- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3427 deleted at process exit time.
3428
3429- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3430 in backslash.
3431
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003432Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003433----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003434
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003435- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3436 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3437 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3438
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003439
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003440What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003441===========================
3442
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3444
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003445Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003446--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003447
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003448- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3449 been extensively updated. See
3450
3451 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3452
3453 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3454
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003455- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3456 deleted!
3457
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003458- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3459 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3460 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3461 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3462 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3463
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003464- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3465
3466 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3467 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3468
3469 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3470 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3471 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3472 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3473 supported anyway.
3474
3475 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3476 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3477
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003478- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3479 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3480 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3481 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3482 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003483
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003484- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3485 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3486 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3487
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003488Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003490
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003491- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3492 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3493 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3494 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3495 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3496 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003497 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3498 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3499 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3500 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003501
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003502- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3503 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3504 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3505
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003506Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003508
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003509- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3510
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003511Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003513
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003514- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3515 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3516 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3517 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3518 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3519 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3520
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003521- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3522
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003523- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3524
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003525- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3526
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003527- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3528 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3529 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3530
3531- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3532
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003533Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003535
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003536- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3537 off a search on Google.
3538
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003539Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003541
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003542- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3543 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3544 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3545 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3546 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3547 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3548 other platforms should do likewise.
3549
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003550- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3551 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3552 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3553
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003554C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003555-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003556
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003557- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3558 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3559 producing key-value pairs.
3560
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003561- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003562 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003563 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3564 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3565 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3566 previously went unchallenged.
3567
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003568New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003570
3571Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003572-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003573
3574Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003576
3577Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003579
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003580- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3581 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003582
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003583- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3584 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3585 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3586 home.
3587
3588
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003589What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003590===========================
3591
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3593
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003594Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003596
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003597- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3598 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003599
3600 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003601 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003602
3603 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3604 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003605 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003606 This needs to be documented.
3607
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003608- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3609 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3610
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003611- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3612 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3613 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3614
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003615- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3616 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3617
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003618- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3619 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3620 class forbids it).
3621
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003622- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3623 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3624 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3625
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003626- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3627
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003628Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003630
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003631- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3632 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003633 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003634
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003635- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3636 (like 1 + '').
3637
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003638Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003640
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003641- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3642 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3643 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3644 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003645 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003646 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3647
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003648- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3649 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3650 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3651 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3652
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003653- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3654 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003655 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3656 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3657 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003658
3659- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3660 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003661
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003662- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3663 bytes on its input.
3664
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003665Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003666-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003667
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003668- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003669 convenience function.
3670
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003671- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3672 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3673 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003674 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3675 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3676 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3677 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3678 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3679 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003680
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003681- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3682 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3683 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3684 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3685
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003686- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3687 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3688 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3689
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003690- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3691 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3692 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3693 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3694
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003695- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3696 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003698 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3699 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3700 new -l and -e options.
3701
3702- statcache is now deprecated.
3703
3704- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3705 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003707 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3708 time properly taken into account.
3709
3710- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3711 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3712 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3713 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3714
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003715Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003717
3718Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003719-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003720
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003721- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3722 is built with libdb3 if available.
3723
3724- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3725
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003726C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003728
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003729- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3730 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3731 PySequence_Size().
3732
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003733- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3734
3735- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3736 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3737 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3738
3739- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3740 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3741
3742- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3743 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3744
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003745New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003747
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003748- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3749 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3750
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003751- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3752 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3753
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003754- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3755
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003756Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003758
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003759- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3760 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3761
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003762Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003764
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003765Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003767
3768- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3769 removed completely in the next release.
3770
3771- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3772 OSX.
3773
3774- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3775 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3776
3777- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3778
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003779
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003780What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003781===========================
3782
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3784
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003785Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003787
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003788- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003789 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003790 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003791 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3792 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003793 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3794 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003795 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3796 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003797
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003798- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3799 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3800
3801- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3802 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3803
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003804Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003806
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003807- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3808 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3809 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3810 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3811 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3812 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3813 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3814 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3815
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003816- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3817 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3818 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3819 example).
3820
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003821- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003822 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003823 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003824 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003825
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003826- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3827 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3828 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003829 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003830
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003831- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3832 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3833 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3834 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3835 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3836 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3837
3838 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3839
3840 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3841
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003842Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003844
3845- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3846
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003847- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3848
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003849- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3850 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003851
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003852- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3853 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3854 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3855 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3856 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3857 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003858 attributes.
3859
3860- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3861 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3862 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003863
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003864- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3865 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3866 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003867
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003868- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3869 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3870 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003871 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3872 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3873
3874- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3875 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003876
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003877Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003878-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003879
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003880- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3881 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3882
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003883- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3884 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3885 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3886 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3887
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003888- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3889 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3890 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3891 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3892
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003893 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3894 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3895 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3896 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3897 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3898 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3899 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3900 without losing information).
3901
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003902- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003903 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3904 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3905 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3906 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3907 module).
3908
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003909 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003910 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3911 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3912 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3913 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003914
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003915- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003916 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3917 encoding.
3918
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003919- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3920 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3921
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003923 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3924
3925- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3926 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3927 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3928 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3929
3930- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3931
3932- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3933 ON, and OFF.
3934
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003935- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3936 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3937
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003938Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003940
3941- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3942 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3943 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003944
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003945- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3946 been added: -X and -E.
3947
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003948Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003949-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003950
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003951- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3952 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3953
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003954C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003956
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003957- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3958 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3959 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3960 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3961 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3962
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003963- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3964 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3965 as long) arguments.
3966
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003967- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3968 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3969 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3970 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3971 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3972 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3973
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003974- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3975 input.
3976
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003977New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003979
3980Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003982
3983Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003985
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003986- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3987 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3988 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3989
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003990- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3991 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3992 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003993 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003994
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3996 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3997 import signal
3998 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004001 while 1:
4002 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004004 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4005 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4006 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4007 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004008
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004009
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004010What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4011===========================
4012
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4014
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004015Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004016--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004017
4018- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4019 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4020 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4021
4022- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4023 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4024 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4025 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4026 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4027 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4028 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004029
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004030- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004031 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004032 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4033 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4034 associate a docstring with a property.
4035
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004036- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4037 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4038 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4039 other built-in object types.
4040
4041- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4042 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4043 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4044 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4045 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4046
4047- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4048 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4049
4050- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4051 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004052 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004053 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4054 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4055 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4056 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4057 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4058
4059- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4060 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4061 class.
4062
4063- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4064 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4065 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4066 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4067
4068- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4069 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4070 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4071 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4072
4073- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4074 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4075
4076- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4077 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4078 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4079 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4080 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004081 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004082 with the same value as s.
4083
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004084- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4085
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004086Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004088
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004089- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4090
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004091- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4092 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4093 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4094 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4095 objects.
4096
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004097- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4098 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004099 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4100 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4101
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004102- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4103 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4104 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4105
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004106Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004108
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004109- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4110 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4111 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4112 by the instances.
4113
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004114- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4115 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4116 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4117
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004118- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4119 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4120 before the entire comparison is complete.
4121
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004122- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4123 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4124 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4125
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004126- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4127 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4128 getwriter().
4129
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004130- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4131 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4132
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004133- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004134 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4135 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4136
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004137- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4138 iterable object.
4139
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004140- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4141 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004142
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004143- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4144 authentication.
4145
4146- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4147 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004148
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004149- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004150 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4151 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4152 a sample driver.)
4153
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004154Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004156
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004157- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4158 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4159 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4160 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4161 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4162 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4163 kernel has large file support.
4164
4165- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4166 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4167 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4168 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4169 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4170
4171- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4172 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4173 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4174
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004175C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004177
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004178- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4179 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4180
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004181New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004183
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004184- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4185 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4186
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004187Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004189
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004190- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4191 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4192 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4193 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4194 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4195
4196- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4197 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4198 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4199 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4200
4201- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4202 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4203
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004204Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004206
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004207- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004208 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4209 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004210
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004211
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004212What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4213===========================
4214
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4216
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004217Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004219
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004220- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4221 big to represent as a C double.
4222
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004223- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4224 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4225 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4226 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4227 restriction).
4228
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004229- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4230 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4231 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4232 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4233 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4234
4235 >>> dir([])
4236 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4237 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4238 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4239 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4240 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4241 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4242 'reverse', 'sort']
4243
4244 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4245
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004246- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004247 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4248 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4249 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4250 OverflowError exception.
4251
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004252- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004253 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004254 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4255 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4256 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4257 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4258 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004259 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4261 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4262
4263 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4264 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4265 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4266 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004267
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004268- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004269 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4270 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4271 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4272 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4273 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4274 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4275 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4276 once it is created.
4277
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004278- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4279 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4280 (key, value) pairs.
4281
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004282- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004283 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4284 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4285
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004286- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4287 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4288 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4289 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4290 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004291
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004292- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004293 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4294 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4295
4296 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4297
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004298- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004299 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4300
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004301Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004303
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004304- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004305 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4306 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004307
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004308- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4309 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4310 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4311 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4312 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4313 in this area anymore).
4314
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004315- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4316 threading.Timer.
4317
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004318- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4319 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4320
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004321- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004322 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4323
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004324- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004325 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4326 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4327 converted to Python longs.
4328
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004329- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004330 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4331
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004332- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4333 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4334 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4335
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004336Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004338
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004339- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4340 division operators as per PEP 238.
4341
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004342Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004344
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004345- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4346 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4347 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4348 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4349
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004350C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004352
4353- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004354
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004355- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4356 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004357 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4360 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004361 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004363
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004364- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004365 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4366 module:
4367
4368 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004369
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004370 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4371 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004372
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004373 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4374 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004375
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004376 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4377
4378 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4379
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004380- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004381 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4382 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4383 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004384
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004385New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004387
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004388- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4389 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4390 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4391 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4392 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004393
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004394Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004396
4397Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004399
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004400- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4401 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4402 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4403 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004404 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4405 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4406 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4407 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4408 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004409
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004410- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004411 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4412
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004413
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004414What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4415===========================
4416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004417*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4418
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004419Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004421
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004422- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4423 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4424
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004425- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4426 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4427 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004428
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004429- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4430 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4431 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4432 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004433
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004434- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4435
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004437
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004438Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004440
4441- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004442 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004443 the module docstring for details.
4444
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004445Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004447
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004448- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004449 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4450 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4451 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004452
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004453- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4454 Nick Mathewson.
4455
4456Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004457----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004458
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004459- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4460 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4461 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4462 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4463 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4464 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4465 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4466 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4467
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004468- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4469 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4470 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4471 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4472
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004473- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4474 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4475 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4476 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4477 come a long way).
4478
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004479- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4480 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4481 write filters for these warnings).
4482
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004483- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4484 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4485 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4486 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4487 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4488
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004489- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4490 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4491 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4492 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4493 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4494 older distribution.
4495
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004496Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004498
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004499- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4500 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004501 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004502
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004503- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4504 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4505 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4506
4507- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4508
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004509- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4510
4511- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4512
4513- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4514
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004516
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004517- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4518
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004519New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004521
4522C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004524
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004525- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4526 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4527 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4528 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4529 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4530 against buffer overruns.
4531
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004532- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004533 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4534 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004535 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4536 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4537 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4538
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004539- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4540 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4541 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4542 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4543 deprecated.
4544
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004545Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004547
4548- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4549 relevant is found.
4550
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004551
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004552What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004553===========================
4554
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4556
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004557Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004559
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004560- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4561 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4562 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4563 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4564 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4565 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4566 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4567 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004568 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004569 repaired.
4570
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004571- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004572 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004573 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4574 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4575 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4576 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4577 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4578 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4579 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4580 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4581
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004582- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4583 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4584 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4585 leading BMO character).
4586
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004587- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4588 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4589 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4590
4591 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4592 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4593 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004594
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004595 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4596 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4597 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4598 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4599 for various simple to use conversions.
4600
4601 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4602 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4603
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4605 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4606 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4607 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4608 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4609 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4610 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4611 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4612 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4613 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4614 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4615 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4616 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4617 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4618 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004619
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004620- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4621 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4622 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004623 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004624 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004625
4626 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004627 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4628 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4629 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4630 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4631 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004632 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4633 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004634
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004635 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4636 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4637 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004638 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004639
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004640- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4641 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4642 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4643 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4644 floating arithmetic,
4645
4646 x = 9007199254740992.0
4647 print long(x)
4648
4649 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4650 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4651 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4652 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4653 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4654 functions are of good quality).
4655
4656 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4657 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4658 algorithms to break.
4659
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004660- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4661 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4662 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4663 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4664 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4665 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4666 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4667 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4668 order.
4669
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004670- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4671 operation along the most common code paths.
4672
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004673- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4674 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4675
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004676- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4677 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4678 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4679 {}.update(UserDict())
4680
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004681- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4682 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4683 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4684 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4685 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4686 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4687 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4688 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4689
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004690- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004691 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004693 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004694 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4695 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004696 join() method of strings
4697 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004698 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4699 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004700 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004701 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004702
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004703- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4704 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4705
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004706- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4707 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4708
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004709- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4710 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4711 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4712 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4713
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004714- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4715 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004716 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004717 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4718 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004719
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004720- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4721
4722
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004723Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004724-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004725
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004726- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004727 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004728 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4729 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4730
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004731- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4732 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4733
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004734- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4735 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4736 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4737 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4738
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004739- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4740 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4741 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4742
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004743- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4744
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004745- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4746
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004747- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4748 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4749 that are still imported into string.py).
4750
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004751- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4752
4753- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4754 Now it does.
4755
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004756- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4757
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004758- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4759 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4760 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4761 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4762 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004763 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4764 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004765
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004766- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4767 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4768 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4769 'help(object)'.
4770
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004771Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004773
4774- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004775 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004776 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4777 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4778
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004779- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004780 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4781 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004782
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004783C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004784-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004785
4786- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4787 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788
4789----
4790
4791**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**