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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
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
16 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
17 which was missing for no apparent reason.
18
19- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
20 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
21 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
22
23Extension modules
24-----------------
25
26Library
27-------
28
29Tools/Demos
30-----------
31
32Build
33-----
34
35C API
36-----
37
38New platforms
39-------------
40
41Tests
42-----
43
44Windows
45-------
46
47Mac
48---
49
50
51
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000052What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
53=================================
54
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +000055*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000056
57Core and builtins
58-----------------
59
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +000060- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
61 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
62 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
63 objects now (one object instead of three).
64
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +000065- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
66 Windows DLLs.
67
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +000068- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
69
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000070- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
71 a new .pyc magic.
72
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000073- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
74 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
75 be there.
76
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000077- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
78 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
79 the LC_NUMERIC category.
80
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000081- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
82 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
83 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
84
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000085- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
86
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000087- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
88 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
89 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000090
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000091- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
92 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
93
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000094- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
95
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000096- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +000097 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000098
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000099- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
100
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000101- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
102
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000103- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
104 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
105
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000106- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
107 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
108 Fixes bug #858016 .
109
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000110- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
111 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
112 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
113
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000114- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
115 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
116 improves their performance (about 35%).
117
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000118- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
119 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
120 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
121
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000122- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
123 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
124 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
125 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
126
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000127- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
128 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
129 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
130 length is not known).
131
132- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
133 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000134 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
135 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000136 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
137
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000138- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
139 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
140
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000141- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
142 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
143 keyword arguments.
144
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000145- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
146 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
147 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
148
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000149- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
150 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
151 cases.
152
153- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
154 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
155 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
156 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
157 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
158 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
159 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
160 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
161 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
162 a release build.
163
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000164- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
165 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
166
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000167- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000168 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000169
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000170- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
171 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
172 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
173 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
174 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
175 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
176 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
177 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
178 destroyed.
179
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000180- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
181 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
182 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
183 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
184 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
185 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
186 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
187 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
188
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000189- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
190 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
191 character other than a space.
192
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000193- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
194 by the function object or by the method object, the function
195 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
196 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
197 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
198 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
199 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
200 attributes with the same name.
201
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000202- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
203 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
204 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
205 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
206 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
207 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
208 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
209 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
210 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
211 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
212 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
213 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
214 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
215 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000216
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000217- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
218 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
219 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
220 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
221 This has been repaired.
222
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000223- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
224
225- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
226
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000227- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
228 over a sequence.
229
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000230- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000231 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000232
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000233- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
234
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000235- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
236 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
237 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
238 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
239 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
240 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
241 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
242 records with equal keys is unchanged).
243
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000244- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
245 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
246 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
247
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000248- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
249 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
250 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
251 freelist.
252
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000253- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
254 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
255
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000256- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
257 number.
258
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000259- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
260 a TypeError exception.
261
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000262- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
263 820195.
264
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000265- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
266 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
267 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
268
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000269- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000270 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
271 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000272
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000273- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
274 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
275 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
276
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000277- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
278 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000279 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000280
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000281- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000282 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
283 the first call.
284
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000285
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000286Extension modules
287-----------------
288
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000289- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
290 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
291
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000292- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
293 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
294 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
295 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
296 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
297 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
298 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000299
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000300- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
301
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000302- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
303
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000304- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
305 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
306
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000307- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
308 fewer false positives.
309
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000310- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
311 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
312
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000313- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000314 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
315
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000316- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000317 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000318 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
319 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
320 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000321
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000322- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
323 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
324 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
325 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
326
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000327- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
328 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
329 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
330 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
331 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
332 #897625.
333
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000334- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
335 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
336
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000337- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
338 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
339 and pops on either side of the deque.
340
341- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
342 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
343
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000344- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
345 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
346 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
347 other functions that expect a function argument.
348
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000349- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
350
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000351- os.getsid was added.
352
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000353- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
354 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
355 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
356
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000357- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
358
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000359- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
360
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000361- readline.clear_history was added.
362
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000363- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
364
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000365- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
366
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000367- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
368
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000369- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
370
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000371- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
372
373- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
374
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000375- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
376
377- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
378
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000379- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
380 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
381 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
382
383- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
384 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
385 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
386 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
387 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
388 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
389 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
390
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000391- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
392 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
393 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
394 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000395
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000396- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000397 iterators from a single iterable.
398
399- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
400 of raising a TypeError exception.
401
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000402- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
403 as parameter.
404
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000405Library
406-------
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000407
408- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
409 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
410 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000411
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000412- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
413 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
414 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000415
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000416- Added Decimal.py per PEP 327.
417
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000418- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
419 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000420
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000421- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
422 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
423
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000424- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
425
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000426- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000427 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000428
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000429- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
430 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
431
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000432- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
433
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000434- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
435 on cygwin and mingw32.
436
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000437- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
438
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000439- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
440 module.
441
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000442- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
443 installation scheme for all platforms.
444
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000445- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000446 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000447
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000448- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
449 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
450 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
451
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000452- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
453 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
454 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
455
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000456- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
457
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000458- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
459
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000460- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
461 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
462
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000463- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
464 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
465 type pattern with the same value exists.
466
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000467- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
468 when run from the command prompt).
469
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000470- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
471 not taken into consideration when caching value.
472
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000473- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
474 default sort).
475
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000476- Added global runctx function to profile module
477
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000478- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
479
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000480- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
481
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000482- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
483
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000484- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000485 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
486 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
487 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
488 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
489 accordingly.
490
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000491- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
492 decoding standards.
493
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000494- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
495 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
496 called for all requests.
497
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000498- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
499 they are passed to the compiler.
500
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000501- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
502 indent, width and depth.
503
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000504- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
505 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
506
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000507- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
508 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
509
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000510- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
511
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000512- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
513
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000514- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
515
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000516- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
517 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
518
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000519- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000520 for better performance.
521
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000522- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000523
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000524- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
525 a string).
526
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000527- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
528
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000529- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
530
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000531- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
532
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000533- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
534
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000535- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
536 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
537 list of fieldnames.
538
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000539- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
540 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
541
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000542- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
543
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000544- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
545 empty lists.
546
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000547- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
548 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
549 and shelves.
550
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000551- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
552 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
553
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000554- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000555 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
556 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000557
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000558- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
559 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000560 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000561
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000562- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000563 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
564 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
565
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000566- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
567 and removed in Py2.4.
568
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000569- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
570
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000571- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
572
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000573Tools/Demos
574-----------
575
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000576- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
577 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
578
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000579- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
580
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000581- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
582 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
583 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
584 destination in situations where both files are given.
585
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000586- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
587 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
588 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
589 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
590
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000591- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
592
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000593- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
594 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
595 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
596 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
597 now.
598
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000599- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
600 in effect
601
602- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
603 C-c C-h
604
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000605- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
606 -d option was given.
607
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000608Build
609-----
610
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000611- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
612 build under OS X.
613
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000614- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
615 --enable-profiling.
616
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000617- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
618 is configured --with-tsc.
619
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000620- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
621 on AMD64.
622
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000623- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
624 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
625
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000626- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
627 removed.
628
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000629- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
630 supported (see PEP 11).
631
632- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
633
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000634- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
635
636- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
637 (see PEP 11).
638
639- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
640 sizeof(char) must be 1.
641
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000642C API
643-----
644
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000645- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
646 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
647 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
648
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000649- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
650 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
651 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
652 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
653
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000654- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
655 generator objects.
656
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000657- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
658 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000659 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
660 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000661
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000662- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
663 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
664
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000665- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
666 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
667 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
668 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
669 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
670
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000671- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
672 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
673 about 10% faster.
674
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000675- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
676 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
677
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000678- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
679 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
680 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
681 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
682
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000683Windows
684-------
685
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000686- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
687 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
688 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
689 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
690
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000691- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
692 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
693 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
694
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000695
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000696What's New in Python 2.3 final?
697===============================
698
699*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
700
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000701IDLE
702----
703
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000704- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
705 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
706 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
707 context-menu actions.
708
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000709- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
710 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
711 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
712 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
713 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
714 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
715 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
716 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
717 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
718
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000719
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000720What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
721=============================================
722
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000723*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000724
725Core and builtins
726-----------------
727
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000728- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000729 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000730 comment at the end are still unsupported.
731
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000732Extension modules
733-----------------
734
735- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
736 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
737 than once. This has been fixed.
738
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000739- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
740 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
741 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
742 call.
743
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000744- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
745
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000746Library
747-------
748
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000749- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
750 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
751
752- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
753 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
754 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
755 restored.
756
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000757IDLE
758----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000759
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000760- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000761
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000762Build
763-----
764
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000765- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
766 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
767
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000768C API
769-----
770
771Windows
772-------
773
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000774- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
775 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
776
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000777- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
778
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000779Mac
780---
781
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000782- Various fixes to pimp.
783
784- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
785
786- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
787 more problems than it solves.
788
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000789
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000790What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
791=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000792
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000793*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
794
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000795Core and builtins
796-----------------
797
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000798- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
799 by sys.setcheckinterval().
800
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000801- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
802 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000803 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000804
805- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
806 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
807 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000808 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000809
810- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
811 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000812
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000813- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
814 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
815 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
816
817- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000818 770247.
819
820- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000821
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000822Extension modules
823-----------------
824
825- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
826 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
827
828- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
829
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000830- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
831
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000832- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
833 contained within the _strptime module.
834
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000835- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
836 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
837
838- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000839 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
840
841- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
842 the find_class attribute, if present.
843
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000844- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000845
846 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
847 (SF bug 763298).
848
849 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000850 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
851 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
852 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000853
854 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
855
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000856Library
857-------
858
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000859- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
860
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000861- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
862 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
863 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
864 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
865 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
866 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
867 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
868 or Tester().
869
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000870- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
871 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
872 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
873 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
874 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
875 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
876 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
877 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
878 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000879
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000880 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000881
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000882- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
883 weren't before was an oversight.
884
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000885- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
886 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
887
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000888- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
889 when there are no lines.
890
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000891- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
892 which could occur with Tk 8.4
893
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000894- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
895 to child processes.
896
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000897- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
898
899- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
900
901- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
902 xmlrpclib.
903
904- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
905 responses.
906
907- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
908 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
909
910- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
911 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
912 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
913
914- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
915 used as patterns.
916
917- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
918 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
919 than Tk 8.3.
920
921- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
922
923- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000924
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000925Tools/Demos
926-----------
927
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000928- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
929
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000930- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
931
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000932- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000933
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000934Build
935-----
936
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000937- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
938
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000939- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
940
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000941- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
942 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000943
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000944- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
945 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
946 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000947
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000948C API
949-----
950
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000951- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
952 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
953
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000954Windows
955-------
956
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000957- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
958 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
959 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
960 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
961 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
962 Python exception ::
963
964 thread.error: can't start new thread
965
966 is raised now.
967
968- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
969 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
970 instead of from DLL teardown.
971
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000972Mac
973---
974
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000975- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000976 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000977 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
978 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
979 the executable in the bundle.
980
981- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000982
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000983- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
984
985- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
986 on Panther.
987
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000988What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
989================================
990
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000991*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000992
993Core and builtins
994-----------------
995
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000996- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
997 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
998 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
999 with the -i option.
1000
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001001- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1002 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1003
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001004- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1005 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1006
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001007- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1008 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1009 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1010 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1011 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1012 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1013 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1014 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1015 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1016 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1017 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1018 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1019 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001020
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001021- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1022 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1023 embedded in a lambda expression.
1024
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001025- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1026 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1027 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1028 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1029 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1030
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001031- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1032 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1033 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1034
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001035- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1036 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1037
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001038- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1039 It's writable again.
1040
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001041- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1042 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1043 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001044 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001045
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001046- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1047 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1048 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1049
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001050Extension modules
1051-----------------
1052
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001053- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1054 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1055
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001056- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1057 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1058 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1059 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1060
1061- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1062 collection.
1063
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001064- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1065 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1066 unique within a single program run.
1067
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001068- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1069 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1070
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001071- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1072 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1073
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001074- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1075 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001076
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001077- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1078
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001079- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1080 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1081
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001082- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1083 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1084 for many BSD-derived systems.
1085
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001086
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001087Library
1088-------
1089
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001090- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1091 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1092 primary ones:
1093
1094 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1095 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1096 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1097
1098 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1099 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1100 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1101 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1102 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1103 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1104
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001105- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1106 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1107 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1108 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1109 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1110 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1111 argument.
1112
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001113- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1114 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1115 in the archive.
1116
1117- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1118 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1119
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001120- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1121 569574).
1122
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001123- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1124 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1125 no more.
1126
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001127- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1128 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1129 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1130 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1131 code coverage.
1132
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001133- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1134 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1135 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001136 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1137 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001138
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001139- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1140 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1141 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001142 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001143
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001144- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1145
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001146- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1147 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1148 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1149 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1150
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001151- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1152 handling.
1153
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001154- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1155 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1156
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001157- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1158 in socket.py.
1159
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001160- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1161
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001162- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1163 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1164 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1165 opener with proxy support.
1166
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001167- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1168
1169- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1170
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001171Tools/Demos
1172-----------
1173
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001174- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1175
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001176- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1177
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001178- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1179 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001180
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001181- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1182 files.
1183
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001184Build
1185-----
1186
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001187- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001188 different root directory.
1189
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001190C API
1191-----
1192
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001193- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1194 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1195 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1196 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1197 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1198 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1199 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1200 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1201 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1202 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1203
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001204- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1205 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1206 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1207 from Python.
1208
1209
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001210New platforms
1211-------------
1212
1213None this time.
1214
1215Tests
1216-----
1217
1218- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1219 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1220
1221Windows
1222-------
1223
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001224- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1225
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001226- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1227 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1228 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1229 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1230 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1231 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1232 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1233 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1234 that's what it's for.
1235
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001236Mac
1237---
1238
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001239- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1240 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1241 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1242 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001243- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1244 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1245- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001246
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001247SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1248------------------------------------
1249
1250430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1251598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1252622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1253661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1254683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1255697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1256713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1257724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1258727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1259729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1260730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1261731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1262732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1263733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1264735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1265740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1266744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1267745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1268747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1269749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1270751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1271753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1272755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1273757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1274760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1275
1276
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001277What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1278================================
1279
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001280*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001281
1282Core and builtins
1283-----------------
1284
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001285- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1286 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1287
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001288- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1289 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1290 and cannot be strings).
1291
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001292- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1293 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1294 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1295 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1296
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001297- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1298 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1299 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1300 Python itself.
1301
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001302- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1303 the referenced object, if it has one.
1304
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001305- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1306 the thread started at
1307 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1308
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001309- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1310 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1311 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1312 placed on a list index.
1313
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001314- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1315 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1316 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1317 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1318
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001319- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1320 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1321 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1322 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1323 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1324 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1325 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1326
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001327- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1328 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1329 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1330 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1331 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1332
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001333- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1334 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001335
1336- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1337 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1338 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1339 #693195.)
1340
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001341- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1342 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001343
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001344- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001345 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001346 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1347 interpreter executions, would fail.
1348
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001349- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001350 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001351 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001352
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001353Extension modules
1354-----------------
1355
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001356- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1357 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1358 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1359 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1360
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001361- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1362 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1363
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001364- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1365 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1366 and Greg Chapman.)
1367
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001368- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1369 recursively.
1370
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001371- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001372 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1373 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1374 leaks.
1375
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001376- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1377
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001378- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1379 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1380 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1381 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1382 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1383 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1384 #705836.
1385
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001386- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001387 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1388
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001389- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1390 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1391 See SF bug #692416.
1392
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001393- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1394 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1395
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001396- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1397 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1398 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001399
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001400- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001401 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1402 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1403
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001404- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1405 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1406 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1407 timeouts to work properly.
1408
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001409Library
1410-------
1411
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001412- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1413 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1414 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1415 future release.
1416
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001417- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1418 for querying platform dependent features.
1419
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001420- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001421
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001422- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1423 pickle protocol versions.
1424
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001425- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1426 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1427 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1428
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001429- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1430
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001431- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1432 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1433 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1434 modules.
1435
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001436- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1437 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1438 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1439
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001440- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1441 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1442
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001443- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1444 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1445 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1446
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001447- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001448 MS Office extensions.
1449
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001450- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1451 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1452
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001453- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1454 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1455
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001456- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1457 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1458 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1459 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1460 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1461 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1462
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001463- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1464 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1465 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001466
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001467- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1468 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1469 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1470
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001471- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1472
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001473- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1474 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1475 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1476
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001477Tools/Demos
1478-----------
1479
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001480- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1481 See the module docstring for details.
1482
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001483Build
1484-----
1485
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001486- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1487 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001488
1489C API
1490-----
1491
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001492- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1493
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001494- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1495 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1496 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1497
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001498- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1499 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001500
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001501 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1502 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1503 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001504
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001505- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001506 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1507
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001508- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1509 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1510 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001511
1512New platforms
1513-------------
1514
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001515None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001516
1517Tests
1518-----
1519
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001520- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1521 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001522
1523Windows
1524-------
1525
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001526- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1527 function.
1528
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001529- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1530 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001531
1532Mac
1533---
1534
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001535- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1536 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001537
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001538- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1539 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001540
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001541- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1542 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1543 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001544
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001545- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001546 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1547 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001548
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001549- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1550 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001551
1552
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001553What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1554=================================
1555
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001556*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001557
1558Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001559-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001560
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001561- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1562 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1563 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1564
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001565- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1566 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1567 (SF patch #664376.)
1568
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001569- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1570 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1571 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1572 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1573 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1574 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001575 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001576
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001577- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1578 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1579 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1580 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001581 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001582
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001583- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1584 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1585 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1586 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1587 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1588 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1589 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1590 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1591 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1592 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1593 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1594
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001595- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1596 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1597 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1598 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1599 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1600 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1601
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001602- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1603 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1604
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001605- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1606 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1607 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1608 case.)
1609
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001610- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1611 passed as unicode strings.
1612
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001613- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1614 See SF bug #683467.
1615
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001616- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1617 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1618
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001619- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1620
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001621- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1622
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001623- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1624 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1625 arguments.
1626
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001627- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1628 See SF bug #667147.
1629
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001630- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001631 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001632 See SF bug #676155.
1633
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001634- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001635 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001636 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1637 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1638 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1639 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1640 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1641 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001642
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001643Extension modules
1644-----------------
1645
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001646- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1647 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1648 tp_as_number pointer.
1649
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001650- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1651 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1652 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1653 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1654 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1655
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001656- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1657
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001658- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1659
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001660- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001661 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001662 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1663 patch #678531.)
1664
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001665- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1666 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1667
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001668- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1669 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1670
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001671- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1672
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001673- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1674 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1675 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1676
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001677- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1678
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001679- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1680 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1681
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001682- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001683
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001684- datetime changes:
1685
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001686 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1687
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001688 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1689 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1690 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1691 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1692 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1693 now.
1694
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001695 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001696 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1697 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001698
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001699 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001700 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001701 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1702 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1703 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1704 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001705
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001706 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1707 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1708 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001709 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1710
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001711 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1712 by a later example coded by Guido.
1713
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001714 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001715 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1716 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1717 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001718 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1719 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1720
1721 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1722 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1723 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1724 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1725 tzinfo subclass instance.
1726
1727 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1728 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1729 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1730 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1731 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1732 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1733 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1734 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001735
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001736 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1737 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1738 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1739 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1740 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001741 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1742
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001743 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001744
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001745 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1746 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1747 as a naive datetime object.
1748
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001749 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1750 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1751 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1752
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001753 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1754 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1755 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1756 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1757 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1758 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1759 comparison.
1760
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001761 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1762 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1763 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1764 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001765 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001766
1767 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001768
1769 and ::
1770
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001771 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1772
1773 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1774 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1775 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1776 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1777
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001778 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1779 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1780 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1781 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1782 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1783
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001784 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1785 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001786 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1787 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001788
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001789Library
1790-------
1791
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001792- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1793 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1794
1795- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1796 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1797 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1798 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1799 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1800 See PEP 307 for details.
1801
1802- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1803 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1804
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001805- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1806 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001807 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001808 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1809 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001810 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001811
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001812- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1813 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1814
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001815- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1816 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1817 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1818
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001819- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1820
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001821- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1822 exception.
1823
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001824- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1825 class.
1826
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001827- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1828 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1829 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1830
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001831- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1832 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1833
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001834- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001835 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1836 See SF bug #659228.
1837
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001838- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1839 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1840 See SF patch #651082.
1841
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001842- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001843
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001844- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1845 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1846
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001847- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001848 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001849
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001850- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1851 DOS paths from other platforms.
1852
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001853Tools/Demos
1854-----------
1855
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001856- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1857 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1858 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1859 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1860 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1861 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1862 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1863 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1864 example:
1865
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001866 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1867 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001868
1869 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1870
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001871
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001872Build
1873-----
1874
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001875- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1876 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1877 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001878 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1879
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001880 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1881
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001882- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1883 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1884 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1885 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1886 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1887 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1888 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1889 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1890 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1891
1892- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1893 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1894 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1895 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1896
1897- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1898 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1899
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001900C API
1901-----
1902
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001903- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1904 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001905
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001906- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1907 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1908 tp_as_number pointer.
1909
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001910- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1911 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1912 (SF #681367)
1913
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001914- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1915 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1916 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1917 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001918
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001919Tests
1920-----
1921
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001922- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001923 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1924 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1925 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1926 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1927 pydoc.)
1928
1929- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1930
1931- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001932
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001933Windows
1934-------
1935
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001936- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1937 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1938 time).
1939
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001940- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1941 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1942
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001943- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1944 release without strong cryptography.
1945
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001946- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001947 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001948
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001949- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1950 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1951
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001952Mac
1953---
1954
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001955- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1956 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001957
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001958- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1959 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1960 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001961
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001962- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1963 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001964
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001965- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1966 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1967 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1968 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001969
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001970- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001971 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1972 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1973 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001974
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001975
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001976What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001977=================================
1978
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001979*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001980
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001981Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001982--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001983
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001984- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1985
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001986- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1987 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001988 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001989 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001990 a different meaning than before.
1991
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001992- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001993 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001994 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001995
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001996- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001997 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001998 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001999
2000- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2001 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2002 and deallocation.
2003
2004- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2005 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2006
2007- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2008 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2009 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2010 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2011 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2012
2013- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2014 now detected by the garbage collector.
2015
2016- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2017 [SF bug 519621]
2018
2019- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2020 identifier.
2021
2022- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2023 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2024 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2025 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2026 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2027 [SF bug 563060]
2028
2029- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2030 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2031 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2032 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2033 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2034
2035- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2036 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2037 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2038
2039- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2040
2041- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2042 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2043 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2044 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2045 state of the slots would be lost.)
2046
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002047Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002048-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002049
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002050- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002051 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2052 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2053 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2054 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002055 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2056 Jython 2.1.
2057
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002058- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002059 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002060 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2061 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2062 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2063 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2064 these, see PEP 302.
2065
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002066- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2067 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2068 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2069
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002070- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2071 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2072 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2073
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002074- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2075 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2076 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2077
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002078- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2079 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2080 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2081 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2082 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2083 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2084 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2085 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2086 releases or implementations.
2087
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002088- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002089 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2090 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002091
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002092- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2093 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2094
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002095- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2096 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2097 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2098
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002099- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2100 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2101
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002102- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2103 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002104 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2105 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002106
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002107- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2108 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2109 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2110 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2111 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2112
2113 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2114 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2115 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2116 pattern.
2117
2118 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2119 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2120 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2121 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2122
2123 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2124 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2125 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2126 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2127 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2128 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2129
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002130- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2131 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2132 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2133 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2134 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2135 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2136 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2137 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002138
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002139- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2140 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2141 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2142 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2143 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002144 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2145 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2146 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2147 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2148 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2149 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2150 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002151
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002152- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2153 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2154
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002155- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2156 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2157 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2158 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2159 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2160 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2161 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2162 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2163 to Zack Weinberg!
2164
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002165- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2166 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2167 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2168 type. This has been fixed now.
2169
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002170- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2171 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2172 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2173
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002174- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2175 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2176 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2177 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2178 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2179 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2180 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2181 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002182 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002183
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002184- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2185 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2186 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002187
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002188- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2189 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2190 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2191 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2192 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2193 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2194 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2195 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002196 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002197 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2198 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2199
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002200- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2201 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2202 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2203 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2204 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2205 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2206 this.)
2207
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002208- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2209 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002210 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002211 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002212 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2213 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002214 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2215 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002216
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002217- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2218 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2219 currently running.
2220
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002221- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2222 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2223 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2224 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2225
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002226- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2227 as directory names.
2228
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002229- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2230 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2231
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002232- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2233 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2234
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002235- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002236 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2237 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002238
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002239- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2240 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2241 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2242 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2243 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2244
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002245- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2246 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2247 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2248 removed.
2249
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002250- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2251 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2252 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2253
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002254- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2255 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2256 to __debug__.
2257
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002258- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2259 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2260 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2261
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002262- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2263 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2264 deprecated now.
2265
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002266- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2267 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2268 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002269
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002270- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2271 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2272 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2273 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2274 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002275
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002276- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2277 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2278
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002279- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2280 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2281 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002282 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002283 is backward compatible.
2284
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002285- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2286 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2287 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2288 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2289 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2290
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002291- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2292 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2293 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2294 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2295 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2296 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002297
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002298- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2299 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2300
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002301- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2302 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2303
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002304- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2305 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2306 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2307 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2308 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2309
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002310- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2311 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2312 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2313
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002314- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002315 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2316
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002317- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2318 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2319 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002320
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002321- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2322 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2323
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002324- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2325 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2326 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2327
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002328- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2329
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002330Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002332
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002333- Added three operators to the operator module:
2334 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2335 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2336 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2337
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002338- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2339
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002340- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2341 archives.
2342
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002343- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2344 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2345 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2346
2347 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2348
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002349- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2350 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2351 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002352 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002353
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002354- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2355 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2356 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2357 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002358 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2359 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2360 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2361 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002362
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002363- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2364 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002365
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002366- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2367
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002368- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2369 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2370
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002371- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2372 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2373 supported.
2374
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002375- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2376
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002377- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2378 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002379
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002380- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2381 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2382
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002383- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2384
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002385- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2386 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2387
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002388- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2389 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2390 functions but callable type objects.
2391
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002392- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002393 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002394 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002395
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002396- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2397 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002398
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002399- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2400 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002401
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002402- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2403 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2404 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2405 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2406
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002407- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2408 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002409
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002410- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2411 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2412 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2413 and __imul__.
2414
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002415- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002416 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2417 is called.
2418
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002419- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2420 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2421 interpreter was compiled.
2422
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002423- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2424 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2425 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002426 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002427 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2428 1, not 2.
2429
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002430- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2431 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2432 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2433 limit.
2434
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002435- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2436 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2437 bug #623464.
2438
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002439- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2440 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2441 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2442 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2443
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002444Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002445-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002446
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002447- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2448
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002449- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2450 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2451 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2452 with Python 2.3a2.
2453
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002454- os.path exposes getctime.
2455
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002456- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002457 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002458 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002459 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002460 unit tests of floating point results.
2461
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002462- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2463 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2464 has been increased.
2465
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002466- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2467 executed.
2468
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002469- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2470 postinstallation script.
2471
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002472- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2473 test the current module.
2474
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002475- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002476 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2477 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2478 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2479 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2480
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002481- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002482 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002483 Ward's Optik package.
2484
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002485- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2486 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2487 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2488 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2489
2490- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2491 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002492 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002493
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002494- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2495 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2496 shelf are binary pickles.
2497
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002498- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2499 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2500
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002501- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2502 modules are iterators now.
2503
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002504- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2505 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2506 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2507 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2508 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2509 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002510
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002511- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2512 with their entity value.
2513
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002514- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2515
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002516- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2517 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002518
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002519- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2520 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002521 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002522
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002523- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2524 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2525 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2526 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2527 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2528 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2529 main():
2530
2531 import locale
2532 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2533
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002534- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2535 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2536
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002537- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2538 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2539 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2540 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2541 to the new standard.
2542
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002543- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2544 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2545 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2546 an extension to the database.
2547
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002548- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2549 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2550 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2551 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002552 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002553
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002554- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002555 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002556
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002557- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2558 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2559 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2560 bounded integers.
2561
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002562- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2563 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2564 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2565 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2566 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2567 in existence.
2568
2569 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2570 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2571 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2572 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2573 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2574 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2575
2576 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2577 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2578 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2579 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2580
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002581- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2582 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2583 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2584
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002585- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2586
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002587- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2588 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2589 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2590 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2591
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002592- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2593 argument.
2594
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002595- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2596 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2597 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2598 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2599 [SF patch 560794].
2600
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002601- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2602 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2603 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002604 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2605 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2606 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002607
2608- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2609 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002610
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002611- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2612 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2613 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2614 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002615
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002616- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2617 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2618 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2619 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2620 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2621
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002622- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002623
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002624- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2625
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002626- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2627 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2628 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2629 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2630 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2631 identical to None.
2632
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002633- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2634 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2635 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2636 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2637 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2638 results now.
2639
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002640- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2641 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2642
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002643- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2644 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2645 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2646 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2647 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2648 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2649 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2650 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2651
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002652- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2653
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002654- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2655 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2656
2657- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2658 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2659 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2660 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2661 and other systems.
2662
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002663- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2664 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2665 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2666 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 +00002667 work well with these.
2668
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002669- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2670
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002671- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002672 connections.
2673
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002674- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2675 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2676 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2677
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002678- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2679 sets
2680
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002681- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2682 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2683 name.
2684
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002685- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2686 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2687 passed in.
2688
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002689- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002690 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002691 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2692 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002693
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002694- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2695
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002696- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2697
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002698- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2699 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2700 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2701
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002702- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2703 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2704 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2705 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002706 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002707
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002708- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002709 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002710 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002711
2712- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2713 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2714 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2715
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002716- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002717 the value of its expression argument.
2718
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002719- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2720 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2721 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2722
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002723- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2724 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2725 skipstone browser was included.
2726
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002727- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2728 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2729
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002730Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002731-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002732
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002733- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2734 names in addition to accepting file names.
2735
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002736- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2737 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2738 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2739 still used and useful.)
2740
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002741- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2742 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2743 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2744 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002745
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002746- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2747 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2748 the generated binary.
2749
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002750Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002751-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002752
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002753- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2754
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002755- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2756 except in the hands of experts.
2757
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002758- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002759 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2760 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2761 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002762
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002763- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2764 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2765 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2766 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2767 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2768 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2769 builds.
2770
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002771- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2772 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2773 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2774 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2775 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2776 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2777 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2778 new type.
2779
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002780- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002781
2782 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2783 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2784 positive infinities.
2785
2786 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2787 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2788 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2789 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2790 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2791 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2792 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2793
2794 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2795
2796 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2797
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002798- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2799 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2800 size of the executable.
2801
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002802- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2803 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2804 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2805 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002806
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002807- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2808
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002809- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2810 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2811 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002812
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002813- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2814 well as Unix.
2815
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002816- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2817 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2818 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2819 modules in the README file for details.
2820
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002821C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002822-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002823
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002824- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2825 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002826 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002827 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002828 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002829
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002830- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2831 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2832 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2833 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2834 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2835 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002836 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002837 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2838 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2839 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2840 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2841 aligned.)
2842
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002843- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2844 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2845 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2846
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002847- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2848 level.
2849
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002850- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2851 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2852 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2853 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2854 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2855
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002856- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2857 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2858 code.
2859
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002860- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2861 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2862 adjusting for negative indices.
2863
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002864- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2865 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2866 object.
2867
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002868- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2869 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2870 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2871
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002872- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2873 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002874
2875- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2876
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002877- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2878 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2879 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2880 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2881
2882- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2883
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002884- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002885
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002886- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002887 without going through the buffer API.
2888
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002889- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002890
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002891- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2892 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2893 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2894 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2895
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002896- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2897 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2898
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002899- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002900 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2901
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002902New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002903-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002904
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002905- OpenVMS is now supported.
2906
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002907- AtheOS is now supported.
2908
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002909- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2910
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002911- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2912
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002913Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002914-----
2915
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002916- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2917 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2918 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002919
2920Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002921-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002922
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002923- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2924 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2925 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2926 bugs.
2927 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002928 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002929 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2930 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002931 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002932
2933- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002934 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002935
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002936- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2937 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2938
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002939- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2940 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002941 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002942 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2943
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002944- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2945 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2946 use files" uninstall option).
2947
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002948- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2949
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002950- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2951 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2952
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002953- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2954 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2955 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2956
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002957- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2958 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2959 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2960 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2961 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002962 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2963 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2964 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002965
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002966- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002967 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002968 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2969 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2970 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2971 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2972 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2973 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2974 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2975 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2976 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2977 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2978 work around.
2979
2980- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2981 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2982 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2983 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2984 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2985 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2986 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2987 specified with O_CREAT too).
2988
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002989Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990----
2991
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002992- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002993
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002994- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2995 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2996 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2997
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002998- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2999 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3000 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3001
3002- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3003 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3004 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3005 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3006 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3007 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3008 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3009 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003010
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003011- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3012 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3013 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003014
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003015- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3016 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3017 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3018 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3019 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003020
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003021- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3022 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3023 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003024
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003025- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3026 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003027
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003028- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3029 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3030 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3031 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3032 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003033
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003034- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3035 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3036 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3037
3038- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3039 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3040 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003041
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003042- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3043 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3044 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3045 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003046 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003047
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003048- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3049 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003050
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003051- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3052 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003053
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003054- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003055 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003056 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3057 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003058
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003059
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003060What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003061===============================
3062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3064
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003065Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003066--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003067
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003068- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3069 with a custom metaclass.
3070
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003071Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003073
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003074- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3075 are proxies.
3076
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003077Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003079
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003080- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3081 very short strings.
3082
3083- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3084 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3085 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3086 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3087 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3088
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003089Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003090-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003091
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003092- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3093 close or delete time).
3094
3095- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3096 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3097
3098- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3099
3100- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003101 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003102
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003103Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003105
3106Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003107-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003108
3109C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003110-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003111
3112New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003114
3115Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003117
3118Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003119-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003120
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003121- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3122
3123- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3124 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3125
3126- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3127 deleted at process exit time.
3128
3129- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3130 in backslash.
3131
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003132Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003134
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003135- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3136 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3137 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3138
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003139
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003140What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141===========================
3142
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3144
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003145Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003146--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003147
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003148- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3149 been extensively updated. See
3150
3151 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3152
3153 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3154
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003155- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3156 deleted!
3157
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003158- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3159 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3160 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3161 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3162 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3163
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003164- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3165
3166 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3167 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3168
3169 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3170 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3171 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3172 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3173 supported anyway.
3174
3175 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3176 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3177
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003178- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3179 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3180 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3181 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3182 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003183
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003184- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3185 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3186 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3187
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003188Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003190
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003191- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3192 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3193 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3194 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3195 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3196 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003197 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3198 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3199 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3200 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003201
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003202- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3203 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3204 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3205
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003206Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003207-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003208
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003209- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3210
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003211Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003213
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003214- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3215 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3216 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3217 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3218 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3219 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3220
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003221- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3222
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003223- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3224
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003225- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3226
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003227- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3228 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3229 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3230
3231- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3232
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003233Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003235
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003236- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3237 off a search on Google.
3238
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003239Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003241
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003242- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3243 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3244 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3245 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3246 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3247 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3248 other platforms should do likewise.
3249
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003250- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3251 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3252 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3253
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003254C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003256
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003257- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3258 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3259 producing key-value pairs.
3260
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003261- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003262 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003263 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3264 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3265 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3266 previously went unchallenged.
3267
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003268New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003269-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003270
3271Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003272-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003273
3274Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003275-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003276
3277Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003278----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003279
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003280- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3281 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003282
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003283- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3284 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3285 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3286 home.
3287
3288
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003289What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003290===========================
3291
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3293
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003294Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003296
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003297- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3298 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003299
3300 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003301 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003302
3303 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3304 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003305 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003306 This needs to be documented.
3307
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003308- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3309 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3310
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003311- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3312 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3313 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3314
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003315- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3316 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3317
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003318- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3319 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3320 class forbids it).
3321
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003322- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3323 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3324 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3325
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003326- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3327
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003328Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003330
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003331- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3332 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003333 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003334
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003335- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3336 (like 1 + '').
3337
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003338Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003340
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003341- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3342 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3343 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3344 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003345 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003346 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3347
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003348- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3349 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3350 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3351 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3352
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003353- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3354 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003355 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3356 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3357 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003358
3359- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3360 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003361
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003362- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3363 bytes on its input.
3364
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003365Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003367
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003368- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003369 convenience function.
3370
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003371- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3372 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3373 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003374 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3375 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3376 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3377 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3378 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3379 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003380
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003381- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3382 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3383 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3384 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3385
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003386- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3387 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3388 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3389
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003390- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3391 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3392 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3393 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3394
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003395- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3396 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003398 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3399 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3400 new -l and -e options.
3401
3402- statcache is now deprecated.
3403
3404- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3405 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003407 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3408 time properly taken into account.
3409
3410- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3411 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3412 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3413 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3414
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003415Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003417
3418Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003420
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003421- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3422 is built with libdb3 if available.
3423
3424- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3425
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003426C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003428
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003429- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3430 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3431 PySequence_Size().
3432
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003433- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3434
3435- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3436 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3437 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3438
3439- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3440 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3441
3442- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3443 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3444
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003445New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003446-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003447
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003448- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3449 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3450
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003451- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3452 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3453
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003454- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3455
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003456Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003458
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003459- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3460 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3461
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003462Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003464
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003465Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003466----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003467
3468- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3469 removed completely in the next release.
3470
3471- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3472 OSX.
3473
3474- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3475 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3476
3477- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3478
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003479
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003480What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003481===========================
3482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3484
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003485Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003487
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003488- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003489 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003490 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003491 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3492 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003493 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3494 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003495 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3496 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003497
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003498- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3499 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3500
3501- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3502 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3503
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003504Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003506
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003507- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3508 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3509 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3510 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3511 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3512 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3513 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3514 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3515
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003516- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3517 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3518 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3519 example).
3520
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003521- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003522 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003523 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003524 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003525
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003526- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3527 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3528 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003529 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003530
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003531- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3532 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3533 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3534 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3535 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3536 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3537
3538 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3539
3540 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3541
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003542Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003544
3545- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3546
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003547- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3548
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003549- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3550 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003551
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003552- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3553 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3554 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3555 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3556 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3557 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003558 attributes.
3559
3560- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3561 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3562 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003563
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003564- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3565 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3566 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003567
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003568- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3569 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3570 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003571 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3572 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3573
3574- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3575 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003576
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003577Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003579
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003580- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3581 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3582
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003583- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3584 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3585 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3586 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3587
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003588- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3589 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3590 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3591 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3592
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003593 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3594 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3595 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3596 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3597 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3598 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3599 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3600 without losing information).
3601
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003602- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003603 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3604 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3605 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3606 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3607 module).
3608
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003609 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003610 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3611 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3612 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3613 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003614
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003615- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003616 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3617 encoding.
3618
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003619- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3620 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3621
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003623 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3624
3625- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3626 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3627 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3628 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3629
3630- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3631
3632- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3633 ON, and OFF.
3634
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003635- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3636 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3637
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003638Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003639-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003640
3641- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3642 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3643 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003644
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003645- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3646 been added: -X and -E.
3647
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003648Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003650
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003651- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3652 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3653
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003654C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003656
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003657- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3658 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3659 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3660 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3661 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3662
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003663- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3664 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3665 as long) arguments.
3666
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003667- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3668 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3669 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3670 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3671 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3672 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3673
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003674- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3675 input.
3676
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003677New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003679
3680Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003682
3683Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003685
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003686- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3687 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3688 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3689
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003690- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3691 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3692 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003693 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003694
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003695 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3696 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3697 import signal
3698 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003699
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003701 while 1:
3702 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003704 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3705 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3706 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3707 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003708
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003709
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003710What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3711===========================
3712
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3714
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003715Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003717
3718- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3719 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3720 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3721
3722- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3723 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3724 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3725 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3726 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3727 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3728 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003729
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003730- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003731 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003732 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3733 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3734 associate a docstring with a property.
3735
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003736- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3737 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3738 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3739 other built-in object types.
3740
3741- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3742 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3743 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3744 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3745 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3746
3747- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3748 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3749
3750- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3751 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003752 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003753 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3754 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3755 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3756 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3757 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3758
3759- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3760 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3761 class.
3762
3763- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3764 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3765 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3766 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3767
3768- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3769 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3770 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3771 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3772
3773- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3774 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3775
3776- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3777 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3778 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3779 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3780 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003781 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003782 with the same value as s.
3783
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003784- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3785
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003786Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003788
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003789- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3790
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003791- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3792 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3793 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3794 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3795 objects.
3796
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003797- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3798 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003799 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3800 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3801
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003802- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3803 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3804 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3805
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003806Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003807-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003808
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003809- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3810 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3811 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3812 by the instances.
3813
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003814- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3815 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3816 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3817
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003818- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3819 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3820 before the entire comparison is complete.
3821
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003822- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3823 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3824 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3825
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003826- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3827 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3828 getwriter().
3829
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003830- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3831 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3832
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003833- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003834 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3835 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3836
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003837- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3838 iterable object.
3839
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003840- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3841 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003842
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003843- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3844 authentication.
3845
3846- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3847 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003848
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003849- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003850 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3851 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3852 a sample driver.)
3853
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003854Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003856
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003857- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3858 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3859 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3860 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3861 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3862 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3863 kernel has large file support.
3864
3865- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3866 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3867 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3868 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3869 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3870
3871- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3872 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3873 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3874
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003875C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003877
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003878- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3879 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3880
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003881New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003883
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003884- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3885 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3886
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003887Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003888-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003889
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003890- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3891 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3892 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3893 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3894 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3895
3896- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3897 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3898 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3899 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3900
3901- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3902 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3903
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003904Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003906
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003907- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003908 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3909 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003910
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003911
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003912What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3913===========================
3914
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003915*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3916
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003917Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003919
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003920- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3921 big to represent as a C double.
3922
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003923- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3924 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3925 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3926 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3927 restriction).
3928
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003929- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3930 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3931 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3932 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3933 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3934
3935 >>> dir([])
3936 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3937 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3938 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3939 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3940 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3941 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3942 'reverse', 'sort']
3943
3944 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3945
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003946- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003947 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3948 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3949 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3950 OverflowError exception.
3951
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003952- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003953 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003954 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3955 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3956 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3957 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3958 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003959 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3961 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3962
3963 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3964 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3965 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3966 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003967
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003968- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003969 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3970 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3971 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3972 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3973 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3974 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3975 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3976 once it is created.
3977
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003978- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3979 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3980 (key, value) pairs.
3981
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003982- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003983 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3984 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3985
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003986- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3987 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3988 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3989 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3990 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003991
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003992- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003993 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3994 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3995
3996 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3997
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003998- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003999 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4000
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004001Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004003
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004004- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004005 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4006 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004007
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004008- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4009 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4010 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4011 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4012 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4013 in this area anymore).
4014
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004015- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4016 threading.Timer.
4017
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004018- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4019 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4020
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004021- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004022 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4023
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004024- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004025 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4026 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4027 converted to Python longs.
4028
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004029- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004030 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4031
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004032- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4033 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4034 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4035
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004036Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004038
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004039- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4040 division operators as per PEP 238.
4041
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004042Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004044
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004045- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4046 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4047 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4048 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4049
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004050C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004051-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004052
4053- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004054
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004055- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4056 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004057 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004058
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4060 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004061 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004063
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004064- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004065 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4066 module:
4067
4068 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004069
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004070 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4071 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004072
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004073 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4074 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004075
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004076 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4077
4078 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4079
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004080- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004081 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4082 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4083 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004084
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004085New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004087
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004088- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4089 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4090 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4091 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4092 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004093
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004094Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004095-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004096
4097Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004099
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004100- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4101 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4102 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4103 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004104 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4105 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4106 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4107 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4108 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004109
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004110- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004111 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4112
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004113
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004114What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4115===========================
4116
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4118
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004119Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004121
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004122- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4123 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4124
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004125- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4126 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4127 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004128
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004129- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4130 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4131 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4132 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004133
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004134- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4135
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004137
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004138Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004139-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004140
4141- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004142 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004143 the module docstring for details.
4144
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004145Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004147
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004148- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004149 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4150 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4151 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004152
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004153- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4154 Nick Mathewson.
4155
4156Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004158
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004159- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4160 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4161 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4162 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4163 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4164 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4165 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4166 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4167
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004168- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4169 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4170 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4171 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4172
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004173- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4174 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4175 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4176 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4177 come a long way).
4178
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004179- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4180 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4181 write filters for these warnings).
4182
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004183- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4184 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4185 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4186 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4187 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4188
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004189- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4190 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4191 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4192 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4193 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4194 older distribution.
4195
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004196Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004197-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004198
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004199- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4200 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004201 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004202
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004203- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4204 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4205 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4206
4207- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4208
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004209- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4210
4211- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4212
4213- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4214
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004216
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004217- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4218
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004219New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004221
4222C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004224
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004225- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4226 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4227 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4228 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4229 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4230 against buffer overruns.
4231
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004232- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004233 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4234 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004235 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4236 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4237 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4238
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004239- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4240 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4241 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4242 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4243 deprecated.
4244
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004245Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004247
4248- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4249 relevant is found.
4250
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004251
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004252What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004253===========================
4254
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4256
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004257Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004259
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004260- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4261 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4262 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4263 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4264 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4265 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4266 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4267 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004268 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004269 repaired.
4270
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004271- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004272 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004273 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4274 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4275 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4276 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4277 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4278 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4279 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4280 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4281
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004282- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4283 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4284 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4285 leading BMO character).
4286
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004287- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4288 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4289 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4290
4291 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4292 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4293 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004294
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004295 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4296 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4297 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4298 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4299 for various simple to use conversions.
4300
4301 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4302 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4305 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4306 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4307 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4308 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4309 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4310 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4311 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4312 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4313 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4314 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4315 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4316 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4317 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4318 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004319
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004320- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4321 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4322 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004323 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004324 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004325
4326 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004327 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4328 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4329 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4330 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4331 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004332 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4333 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004334
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004335 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4336 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4337 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004338 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004339
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004340- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4341 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4342 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4343 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4344 floating arithmetic,
4345
4346 x = 9007199254740992.0
4347 print long(x)
4348
4349 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4350 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4351 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4352 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4353 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4354 functions are of good quality).
4355
4356 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4357 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4358 algorithms to break.
4359
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004360- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4361 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4362 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4363 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4364 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4365 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4366 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4367 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4368 order.
4369
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004370- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4371 operation along the most common code paths.
4372
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004373- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4374 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4375
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004376- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4377 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4378 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4379 {}.update(UserDict())
4380
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004381- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4382 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4383 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4384 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4385 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4386 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4387 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4388 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4389
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004390- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004391 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004392
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004393 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004394 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4395 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004396 join() method of strings
4397 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004398 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4399 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004401 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004402
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004403- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4404 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4405
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004406- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4407 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4408
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004409- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4410 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4411 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4412 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4413
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004414- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4415 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004416 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004417 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4418 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004419
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004420- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4421
4422
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004423Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004425
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004426- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004427 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004428 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4429 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4430
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004431- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4432 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4433
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004434- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4435 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4436 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4437 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4438
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004439- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4440 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4441 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4442
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004443- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4444
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004445- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4446
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004447- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4448 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4449 that are still imported into string.py).
4450
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004451- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4452
4453- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4454 Now it does.
4455
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004456- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4457
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004458- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4459 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4460 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4461 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4462 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004463 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4464 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004465
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004466- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4467 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4468 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4469 'help(object)'.
4470
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004471Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004473
4474- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004475 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004476 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4477 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4478
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004479- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004480 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4481 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004482
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004483C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004485
4486- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4487 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488
4489----
4490
4491**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**