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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
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000015- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
16 constant.
17
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000018- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
19 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
20 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
21 large), and to anomalies such as
22 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
23 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
24 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
25 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000026
27Extension modules
28-----------------
29
30...
31
32Library
33-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000034
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000035- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
36 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
37 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
38 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
39
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000040- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000041
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000042- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
43 applications should use the getmember function.
44
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000045- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
46
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000047- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
48 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
49 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
50 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
51 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
52 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
53 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
54 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
55 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
56
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000057- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
58 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000059 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000060
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000061- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
62 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
63 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
64 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
65 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
66 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
67 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
68 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000069
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000070- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000071 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
72 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
73 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
74 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
75 integration features instead. It would help if those were documented.
76
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000077- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
78
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000079Build
80-----
81
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +000082- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
83 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
84 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
85 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
86 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000087
88C API
89-----
90
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000091- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
92
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000093- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
94 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
95 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000096
97Documentation
98-------------
99
100...
101
102Tests
103-----
104
105- test__locale ported to unittest
106
107Windows
108-------
109
110...
111
112Mac
113---
114
115...
116
117New platforms
118-------------
119
120...
121
122Tools/Demos
123-----------
124
125...
126
127
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000128What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
129=================================
130
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000131*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000132
133Core and builtins
134-----------------
135
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000136- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000137 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
138
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000139- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
140 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
141 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
142 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
143 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
144 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
145 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
146 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000147 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
148 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
149 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
150 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
151 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000152
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000153- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
154 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
155 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
156 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
157 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
158
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000159- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
160
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000161- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
162 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
163
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000164- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
165 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
166 modified the list.
167
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000168- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
169 functions is now writable.
170
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000171- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
172 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
173 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
174 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
175
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000176- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
177 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
178 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
179 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
180 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000181
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000182- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
183 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
184
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000185Extension modules
186-----------------
187
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000188- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
189
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000190- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
191 data.
192
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000193- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
194 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
195 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
196 supposed to have been truncated away.
197
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000198- Added socket.socketpair().
199
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000200- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
201 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
202
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000203- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000204 versions of Python, have now been removed.
205
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000206Library
207-------
208
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000209- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000210 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000211
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000212- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
213 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
214
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000215- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
216 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
217
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000218- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
219
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000220- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
221 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000222
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000223- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
224 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
225
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000226- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
227
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000228- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
229
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000230- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
231
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000232- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
233 Percivall.
234
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000235- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
236 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
237
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000238- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
239 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
240 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000241 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000242
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000243- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
244 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
245 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
246 and exponent.
247
248- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
249
250- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
251 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
252 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
253
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000254- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
255 to the readline module.
256
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000257- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000258 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
259 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000260
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000261- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
262 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
263 contains symlinks.
264
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000265- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
266 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
267
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000268- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
269 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
270 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
271
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000272- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
273 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
274 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
275 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
276 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
277 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
278 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
279 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
280 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
281 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
282 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
283 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
284 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
285
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000286- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
287
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000288Tools/Demos
289-----------
290
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000291- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
292 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
293
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000294- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
295
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000296Build
297-----
298
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000299- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
300 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
301 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
302 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
303 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
304 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
305 plans to do so.
306
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000307- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
308 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
309
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000310- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
311 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
312
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000313- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
314 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
315
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000316- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
317 GNU/k*BSD systems.
318
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000319- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
320 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
321
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000322C API
323-----
324
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000325..
326
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000327Documentation
328-------------
329
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000330- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
331 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
332
333- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
334 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
335 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000337New platforms
338-------------
339
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000340- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
341
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000342Tests
343-----
344
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000345..
346
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000347Windows
348-------
349
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000350- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
351 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
352 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
353 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
354 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
355 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
356 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
357 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
358 the problem.
359
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000360Mac
361---
362
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000363..
364
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000365
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000366What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
367=================================
368
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000369*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000370
371Core and builtins
372-----------------
373
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000374- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
375 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
376 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
377 sensitive code.
378
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000379- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000380 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000381
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000382 @staticmethod
383 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000384
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000385 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000386
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000387- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
388 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
389 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
390 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
391 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
392 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
393 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
394 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
395 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
396 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
397 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
398
399 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
400 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
401 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
402 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
403 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
404 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
405 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
406
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000407- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
408 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
409
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000410- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000411 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000412
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000413- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000414 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000415 which was missing for no apparent reason.
416
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000417- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000418 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
419 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
420
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000421- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
422 types that support garbage collection.
423
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000424- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
425
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000426- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
427 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
428 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
429 Jython.
430
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000431- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
432
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000433- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
434 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
435
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000436- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
437 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
438 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000439
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000440- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
441 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
442 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
443
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000444Extension modules
445-----------------
446
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000447- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
448
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000449Library
450-------
451
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000452- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
453 TIS-620
454
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000455- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
456 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
457 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
458 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
459 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
460 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
461 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
462 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
463 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
464 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
465
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000466- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
467
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000468- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
469 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
470 same as when the argument is omitted).
471 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
472
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000473- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
474
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000475- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
476 schemes are offered.
477
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000478- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
479
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000480- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
481 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
482 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
483
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000484- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
485
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000486- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
487 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
488
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000489- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
490 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
491 when dummy_threading is being used.
492
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000493- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
494 from a tarfile.
495
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000496- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000497 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000498
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000499- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
500 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
501 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
502 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
503
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000504- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
505 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
506
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000507- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
508 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
509 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
510 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
511 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
512 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
513 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
514 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
515 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
516 by some other method in progress).
517
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000518- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
519 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
520 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000521
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000522- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
523
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000524- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
525 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
526 AM Kuchling.
527
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000528- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
529 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
530 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
531
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000532- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
533 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
534 instead of unsigned.
535
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000536- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000537 no longer part of the public API.
538
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000539- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
540 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
541 string methods of the same name).
542
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000543- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000544 SF patch 945642.
545
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000546- doctest unittest integration improvements:
547
548 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
549
550 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
551 DocTestSuites.
552
553- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
554 that provide thread-local data.
555
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000556- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
557 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
558
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000559- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
560
561- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
562 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
563 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
564
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000565- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
566
567 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
568 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
569 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000570
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000571 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
572 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
573 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
574 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
575
576 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
577 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
578
579 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
580 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
581 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
582 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
583
584 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
585 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
586 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
587 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
588 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
589
590 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
591 wrapping help output.
592
593 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
594 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
595 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000596
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000597C API
598-----
599
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000600- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
601 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
602 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
603 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
604 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
605 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
606 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
607 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
608 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
609 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
610 its visible semantics have not changed.
611
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000612- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
613 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
614
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000615Documentation
616-------------
617
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000618- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000619
620 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000621 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000622
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000623 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000624
625 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
626
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000627- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000628
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000629Tests
630-----
631
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000632- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000633 platforms that use the Makefile.
634
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000635- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
636 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
637 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
638
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000639
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000640What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
641=================================
642
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000643*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000644
645Core and builtins
646-----------------
647
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000648- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
649 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
650 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
651 objects now (one object instead of three).
652
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000653- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
654 Windows DLLs.
655
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000656- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
657 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000658
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000659- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
660 a new .pyc magic.
661
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000662- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
663 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
664 be there.
665
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000666- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
667 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
668 the LC_NUMERIC category.
669
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000670- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
671 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
672 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
673
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000674- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
675
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000676- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
677 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
678 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000679
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000680- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
681 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
682
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000683- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
684
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000685- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000686 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000687
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000688- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
689
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000690- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
691
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000692- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
693 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
694
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000695- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
696 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
697 Fixes bug #858016 .
698
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000699- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
700 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
701 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
702
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000703- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
704 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
705 improves their performance (about 35%).
706
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000707- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
708 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
709 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
710
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000711- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
712 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
713 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
714 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
715
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000716- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
717 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
718 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
719 length is not known).
720
721- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
722 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000723 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
724 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000725 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
726
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000727- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
728 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
729
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000730- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
731 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
732 keyword arguments.
733
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000734- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
735 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
736 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
737
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000738- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
739 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
740 cases.
741
742- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
743 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
744 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
745 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
746 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
747 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
748 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
749 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
750 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
751 a release build.
752
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000753- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
754 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
755
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000756- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000757 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000758
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000759- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
760 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
761 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
762 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
763 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
764 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
765 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
766 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
767 destroyed.
768
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000769- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
770 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
771 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
772 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
773 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
774 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
775 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
776 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
777
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000778- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
779 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
780 character other than a space.
781
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000782- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
783 by the function object or by the method object, the function
784 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
785 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
786 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
787 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
788 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
789 attributes with the same name.
790
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000791- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
792 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
793 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
794 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
795 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
796 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
797 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
798 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
799 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
800 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
801 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
802 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
803 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
804 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000805
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000806- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
807 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
808 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
809 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
810 This has been repaired.
811
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000812- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
813
814- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
815
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000816- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
817 over a sequence.
818
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000819- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000820 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000821
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000822- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
823
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000824- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
825 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
826 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
827 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
828 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
829 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
830 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
831 records with equal keys is unchanged).
832
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000833- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
834 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
835 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
836
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000837- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
838 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
839 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
840 freelist.
841
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000842- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
843 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
844
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000845- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
846 number.
847
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000848- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
849 a TypeError exception.
850
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000851- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
852 820195.
853
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000854- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
855 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
856 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
857
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000858- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000859 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
860 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000861
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000862- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
863 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
864 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
865
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000866- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
867 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000868 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000869
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000870- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000871 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
872 the first call.
873
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000874
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000875Extension modules
876-----------------
877
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000878- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
879 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
880
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000881- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
882 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
883 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
884 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
885 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
886 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
887 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000888
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000889- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
890
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000891- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
892
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000893- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
894 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
895
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000896- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
897 fewer false positives.
898
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000899- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
900 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
901
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000902- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000903 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
904
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000905- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000906 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000907 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000908 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
909 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000910
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000911- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
912 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
913 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
914 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
915
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000916- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
917 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
918 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
919 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
920 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
921 #897625.
922
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000923- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
924 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
925
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000926- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
927 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
928 and pops on either side of the deque.
929
930- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
931 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
932
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000933- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
934 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
935 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
936 other functions that expect a function argument.
937
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000938- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
939
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000940- os.getsid was added.
941
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000942- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
943 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
944 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
945
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000946- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
947
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000948- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
949
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000950- readline.clear_history was added.
951
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000952- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
953
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000954- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
955
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000956- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
957
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000958- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
959
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000960- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
961
962- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
963
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000964- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
965
966- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
967
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000968- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
969 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
970 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
971
972- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
973 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
974 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
975 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
976 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
977 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
978 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
979
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000980- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
981 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
982 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
983 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000984
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000985- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000986 iterators from a single iterable.
987
988- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
989 of raising a TypeError exception.
990
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000991- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
992 as parameter.
993
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000994Library
995-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000996
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000997- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
998 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
999 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001000
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001001- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1002 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1003 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001004
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001005- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001006
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001007- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1008 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001009
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001010- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1011 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1012
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001013- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1014
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001015- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001016 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001017
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001018- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001019 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001020
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001021- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1022
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001023- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1024 on cygwin and mingw32.
1025
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001026- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1027
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001028- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1029 module.
1030
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001031- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1032 installation scheme for all platforms.
1033
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001034- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001035 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001036
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001037- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1038 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1039 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1040
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001041- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1042 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1043 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1044
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001045- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1046
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001047- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1048
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001049- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1050 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1051
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001052- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1053 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1054 type pattern with the same value exists.
1055
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001056- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1057 when run from the command prompt).
1058
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001059- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1060 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1061
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001062- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1063 default sort).
1064
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001065- Added global runctx function to profile module
1066
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001067- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1068
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001069- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1070
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001071- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1072
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001073- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001074 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1075 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1076 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1077 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1078 accordingly.
1079
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001080- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1081 decoding standards.
1082
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001083- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1084 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1085 called for all requests.
1086
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001087- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1088 they are passed to the compiler.
1089
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001090- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1091 indent, width and depth.
1092
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001093- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1094 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1095
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001096- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1097 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1098
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001099- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1100
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001101- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1102
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001103- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1104
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001105- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1106 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1107
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001108- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001109 for better performance.
1110
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001111- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001112
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001113- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1114 a string).
1115
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001116- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1117
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001118- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1119
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001120- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1121
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001122- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1123
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001124- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1125 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1126 list of fieldnames.
1127
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001128- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1129 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1130
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001131- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1132
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001133- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1134 empty lists.
1135
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001136- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1137 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1138 and shelves.
1139
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001140- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1141 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1142
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001143- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001144 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1145 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001146
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001147- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1148 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001149 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001150
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001151- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001152 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1153 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1154
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001155- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1156 and removed in Py2.4.
1157
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001158- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1159
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001160- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1161
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001162Tools/Demos
1163-----------
1164
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001165- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1166 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1167
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001168- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1169
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001170- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1171 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1172 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1173 destination in situations where both files are given.
1174
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001175- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1176 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1177 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1178 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1179
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001180- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1181
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001182- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1183 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1184 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1185 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1186 now.
1187
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001188- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1189 in effect
1190
1191- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1192 C-c C-h
1193
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001194- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1195 -d option was given.
1196
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001197Build
1198-----
1199
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001200- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1201 build under OS X.
1202
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001203- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1204 --enable-profiling.
1205
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001206- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1207 is configured --with-tsc.
1208
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001209- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1210 on AMD64.
1211
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001212- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1213 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1214
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001215- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1216 removed.
1217
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001218- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1219 supported (see PEP 11).
1220
1221- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1222
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001223- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1224
1225- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1226 (see PEP 11).
1227
1228- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1229 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1230
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001231C API
1232-----
1233
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001234- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1235 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1236 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1237
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001238- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1239 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1240 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1241 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1242
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001243- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1244 generator objects.
1245
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001246- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1247 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001248 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1249 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001250
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001251- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1252 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1253
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001254- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1255 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1256 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1257 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1258 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1259
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001260- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1261 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1262 about 10% faster.
1263
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001264- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1265 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1266
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001267- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1268 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1269 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1270 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1271
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001272Windows
1273-------
1274
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001275- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1276 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1277 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1278 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1279
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001280- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1281 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1282 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1283
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001284
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001285What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1286===============================
1287
1288*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1289
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001290IDLE
1291----
1292
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001293- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1294 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1295 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1296 context-menu actions.
1297
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001298- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1299 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1300 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1301 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1302 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1303 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1304 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1305 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1306 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1307
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001308
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001309What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1310=============================================
1311
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001312*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001313
1314Core and builtins
1315-----------------
1316
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001317- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001318 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001319 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1320
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001321Extension modules
1322-----------------
1323
1324- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1325 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1326 than once. This has been fixed.
1327
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001328- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1329 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1330 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1331 call.
1332
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001333- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1334
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001335Library
1336-------
1337
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001338- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1339 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1340
1341- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1342 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1343 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1344 restored.
1345
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001346IDLE
1347----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001348
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001349- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001350
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001351Build
1352-----
1353
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001354- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1355 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1356
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001357C API
1358-----
1359
1360Windows
1361-------
1362
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001363- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1364 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1365
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001366- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1367
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001368Mac
1369---
1370
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001371- Various fixes to pimp.
1372
1373- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1374
1375- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1376 more problems than it solves.
1377
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001378
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001379What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1380=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001381
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001382*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1383
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001384Core and builtins
1385-----------------
1386
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001387- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1388 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1389
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001390- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1391 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001392 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001393
1394- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1395 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1396 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001397 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001398
1399- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1400 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001401
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001402- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1403 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1404 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1405
1406- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001407 770247.
1408
1409- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001410
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001411Extension modules
1412-----------------
1413
1414- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1415 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1416
1417- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1418
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001419- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1420
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001421- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1422 contained within the _strptime module.
1423
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001424- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1425 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1426
1427- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001428 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1429
1430- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1431 the find_class attribute, if present.
1432
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001433- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001434
1435 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1436 (SF bug 763298).
1437
1438 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001439 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1440 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1441 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001442
1443 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1444
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001445Library
1446-------
1447
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001448- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1449
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001450- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1451 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1452 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1453 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1454 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1455 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1456 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1457 or Tester().
1458
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001459- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1460 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1461 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1462 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1463 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1464 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1465 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1466 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1467 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001468
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001469 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001470
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001471- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1472 weren't before was an oversight.
1473
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001474- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1475 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1476
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001477- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1478 when there are no lines.
1479
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001480- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1481 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1482
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001483- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1484 to child processes.
1485
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001486- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1487
1488- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1489
1490- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1491 xmlrpclib.
1492
1493- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1494 responses.
1495
1496- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1497 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1498
1499- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1500 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1501 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1502
1503- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1504 used as patterns.
1505
1506- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1507 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1508 than Tk 8.3.
1509
1510- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1511
1512- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001513
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001514Tools/Demos
1515-----------
1516
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001517- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1518
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001519- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1520
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001521- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001522
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001523Build
1524-----
1525
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001526- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1527
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001528- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1529
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001530- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1531 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001532
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001533- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1534 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1535 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001536
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001537C API
1538-----
1539
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001540- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1541 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1542
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001543Windows
1544-------
1545
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001546- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1547 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1548 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1549 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1550 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1551 Python exception ::
1552
1553 thread.error: can't start new thread
1554
1555 is raised now.
1556
1557- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1558 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1559 instead of from DLL teardown.
1560
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001561Mac
1562---
1563
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001564- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001565 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001566 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1567 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1568 the executable in the bundle.
1569
1570- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001571
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001572- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1573
1574- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1575 on Panther.
1576
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001577What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1578================================
1579
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001580*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001581
1582Core and builtins
1583-----------------
1584
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001585- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1586 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1587 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1588 with the -i option.
1589
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001590- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1591 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1592
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001593- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1594 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1595
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001596- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1597 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1598 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1599 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1600 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1601 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1602 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1603 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1604 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1605 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1606 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1607 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1608 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001609
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001610- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1611 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1612 embedded in a lambda expression.
1613
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001614- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1615 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1616 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1617 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1618 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1619
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001620- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1621 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1622 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1623
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001624- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1625 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1626
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001627- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1628 It's writable again.
1629
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001630- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1631 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1632 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001633 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001634
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001635- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1636 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1637 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1638
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001639Extension modules
1640-----------------
1641
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001642- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1643 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1644
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001645- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1646 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1647 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1648 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1649
1650- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1651 collection.
1652
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001653- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1654 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1655 unique within a single program run.
1656
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001657- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1658 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1659
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001660- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1661 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1662
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001663- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1664 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001665
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001666- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1667
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001668- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1669 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1670
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001671- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1672 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1673 for many BSD-derived systems.
1674
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001675
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001676Library
1677-------
1678
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001679- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1680 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1681 primary ones:
1682
1683 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1684 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1685 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1686
1687 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1688 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1689 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1690 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1691 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1692 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1693
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001694- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1695 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1696 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1697 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1698 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1699 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1700 argument.
1701
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001702- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1703 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1704 in the archive.
1705
1706- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1707 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1708
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001709- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1710 569574).
1711
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001712- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1713 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1714 no more.
1715
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001716- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1717 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1718 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1719 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1720 code coverage.
1721
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001722- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1723 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1724 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001725 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1726 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001727
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001728- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1729 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1730 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001731 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001732
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001733- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1734
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001735- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1736 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1737 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1738 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1739
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001740- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1741 handling.
1742
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001743- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1744 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1745
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001746- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1747 in socket.py.
1748
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001749- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1750
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001751- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1752 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1753 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1754 opener with proxy support.
1755
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001756- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1757
1758- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1759
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001760Tools/Demos
1761-----------
1762
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001763- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1764
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001765- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1766
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001767- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1768 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001769
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001770- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1771 files.
1772
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001773Build
1774-----
1775
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001776- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001777 different root directory.
1778
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001779C API
1780-----
1781
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001782- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1783 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1784 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1785 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1786 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1787 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1788 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1789 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1790 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1791 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1792
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001793- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1794 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1795 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1796 from Python.
1797
1798
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001799New platforms
1800-------------
1801
1802None this time.
1803
1804Tests
1805-----
1806
1807- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1808 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1809
1810Windows
1811-------
1812
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001813- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1814
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001815- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1816 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1817 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1818 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1819 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1820 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1821 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1822 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1823 that's what it's for.
1824
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001825Mac
1826---
1827
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001828- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1829 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1830 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1831 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001832- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1833 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1834- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001835
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001836SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1837------------------------------------
1838
1839430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1840598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1841622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1842661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1843683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1844697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1845713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1846724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1847727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1848729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1849730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1850731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1851732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1852733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1853735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1854740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1855744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1856745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1857747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1858749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1859751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1860753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1861755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1862757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1863760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1864
1865
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001866What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1867================================
1868
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001869*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001870
1871Core and builtins
1872-----------------
1873
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001874- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1875 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1876
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001877- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1878 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1879 and cannot be strings).
1880
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001881- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1882 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1883 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1884 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1885
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001886- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1887 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1888 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1889 Python itself.
1890
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001891- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1892 the referenced object, if it has one.
1893
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001894- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1895 the thread started at
1896 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1897
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001898- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1899 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1900 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1901 placed on a list index.
1902
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001903- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1904 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1905 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1906 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1907
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001908- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1909 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1910 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1911 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1912 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1913 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1914 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1915
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001916- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1917 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1918 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1919 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1920 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1921
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001922- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1923 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001924
1925- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1926 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1927 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1928 #693195.)
1929
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001930- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1931 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001932
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001933- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001934 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001935 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1936 interpreter executions, would fail.
1937
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001938- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001939 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001940 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001941
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001942Extension modules
1943-----------------
1944
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001945- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1946 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1947 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1948 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1949
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001950- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1951 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1952
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001953- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1954 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1955 and Greg Chapman.)
1956
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001957- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1958 recursively.
1959
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001960- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001961 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1962 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1963 leaks.
1964
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001965- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1966
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001967- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1968 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1969 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1970 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1971 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1972 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1973 #705836.
1974
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001975- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001976 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1977
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001978- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1979 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1980 See SF bug #692416.
1981
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001982- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1983 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1984
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001985- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1986 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1987 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001988
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001989- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001990 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1991 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1992
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001993- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1994 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1995 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1996 timeouts to work properly.
1997
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001998Library
1999-------
2000
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002001- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2002 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2003 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2004 future release.
2005
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002006- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2007 for querying platform dependent features.
2008
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002009- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002010
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002011- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2012 pickle protocol versions.
2013
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002014- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2015 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2016 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2017
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002018- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2019
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002020- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2021 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2022 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2023 modules.
2024
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002025- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2026 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2027 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2028
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002029- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2030 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2031
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002032- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2033 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2034 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2035
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002036- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002037 MS Office extensions.
2038
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002039- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2040 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2041
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002042- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2043 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2044
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002045- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2046 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2047 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2048 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2049 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2050 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2051
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002052- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2053 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2054 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002055
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002056- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2057 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2058 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2059
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002060- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2061
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002062- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2063 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2064 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2065
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002066Tools/Demos
2067-----------
2068
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002069- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2070 See the module docstring for details.
2071
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002072Build
2073-----
2074
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002075- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2076 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002077
2078C API
2079-----
2080
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002081- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2082
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002083- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2084 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2085 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2086
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002087- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2088 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002089
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002090 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2091 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2092 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002093
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002094- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002095 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2096
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002097- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2098 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2099 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002100
2101New platforms
2102-------------
2103
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002104None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002105
2106Tests
2107-----
2108
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002109- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2110 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002111
2112Windows
2113-------
2114
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002115- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2116 function.
2117
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002118- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2119 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002120
2121Mac
2122---
2123
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002124- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2125 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002126
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002127- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2128 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002129
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002130- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2131 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2132 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002133
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002134- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002135 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2136 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002137
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002138- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2139 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002140
2141
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002142What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2143=================================
2144
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002145*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002146
2147Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002148-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002149
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002150- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2151 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2152 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2153
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002154- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2155 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2156 (SF patch #664376.)
2157
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002158- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2159 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2160 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2161 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2162 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2163 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002164 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002165
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002166- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2167 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2168 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2169 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002170 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002171
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002172- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2173 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2174 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2175 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2176 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2177 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2178 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2179 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2180 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2181 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2182 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2183
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002184- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2185 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2186 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2187 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2188 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2189 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2190
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002191- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2192 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2193
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002194- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2195 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2196 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2197 case.)
2198
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002199- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2200 passed as unicode strings.
2201
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002202- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2203 See SF bug #683467.
2204
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002205- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2206 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2207
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002208- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2209
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002210- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2211
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002212- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2213 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2214 arguments.
2215
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002216- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2217 See SF bug #667147.
2218
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002219- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002220 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002221 See SF bug #676155.
2222
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002223- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002224 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002225 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2226 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2227 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2228 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2229 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2230 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002231
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002232Extension modules
2233-----------------
2234
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002235- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2236 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2237 tp_as_number pointer.
2238
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002239- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2240 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2241 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2242 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2243 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2244
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002245- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2246
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002247- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2248
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002249- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002250 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002251 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2252 patch #678531.)
2253
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002254- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2255 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2256
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002257- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2258 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2259
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002260- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2261
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002262- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2263 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2264 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2265
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002266- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2267
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002268- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2269 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2270
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002271- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002272
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002273- datetime changes:
2274
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002275 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2276
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002277 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2278 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2279 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2280 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2281 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2282 now.
2283
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002284 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002285 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2286 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002287
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002288 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002289 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002290 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2291 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2292 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2293 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002294
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002295 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2296 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2297 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002298 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2299
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002300 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2301 by a later example coded by Guido.
2302
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002303 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002304 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2305 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2306 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002307 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2308 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2309
2310 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2311 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2312 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2313 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2314 tzinfo subclass instance.
2315
2316 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2317 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2318 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2319 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2320 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2321 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2322 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2323 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002324
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002325 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2326 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2327 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2328 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2329 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002330 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2331
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002332 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002333
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002334 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2335 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2336 as a naive datetime object.
2337
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002338 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2339 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2340 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2341
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002342 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2343 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2344 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2345 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2346 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2347 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2348 comparison.
2349
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002350 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2351 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2352 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2353 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002354 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002355
2356 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002357
2358 and ::
2359
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002360 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2361
2362 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2363 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2364 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2365 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2366
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002367 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2368 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2369 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2370 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2371 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2372
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002373 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2374 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002375 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2376 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002377
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002378Library
2379-------
2380
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002381- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2382 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2383
2384- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2385 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2386 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2387 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2388 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2389 See PEP 307 for details.
2390
2391- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2392 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2393
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002394- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2395 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002396 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002397 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2398 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002399 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002400
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002401- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2402 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2403
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002404- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2405 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2406 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2407
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002408- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2409
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002410- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2411 exception.
2412
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002413- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2414 class.
2415
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002416- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2417 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2418 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2419
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002420- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2421 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2422
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002423- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002424 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2425 See SF bug #659228.
2426
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002427- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2428 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2429 See SF patch #651082.
2430
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002431- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002432
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002433- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2434 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2435
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002436- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002437 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002438
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002439- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2440 DOS paths from other platforms.
2441
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002442Tools/Demos
2443-----------
2444
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002445- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2446 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2447 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2448 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2449 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2450 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2451 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2452 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2453 example:
2454
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002455 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2456 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002457
2458 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2459
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002461Build
2462-----
2463
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002464- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2465 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2466 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002467 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2468
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002469 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2470
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002471- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2472 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2473 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2474 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2475 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2476 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2477 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2478 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2479 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2480
2481- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2482 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2483 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2484 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2485
2486- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2487 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2488
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002489C API
2490-----
2491
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002492- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2493 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002494
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002495- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2496 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2497 tp_as_number pointer.
2498
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002499- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2500 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2501 (SF #681367)
2502
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002503- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2504 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2505 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2506 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002507
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002508Tests
2509-----
2510
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002511- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002512 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2513 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2514 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2515 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2516 pydoc.)
2517
2518- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2519
2520- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002521
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002522Windows
2523-------
2524
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002525- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2526 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2527 time).
2528
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002529- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2530 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2531
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002532- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2533 release without strong cryptography.
2534
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002535- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002536 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002537
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002538- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2539 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002541Mac
2542---
2543
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002544- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2545 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002546
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002547- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2548 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2549 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002550
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002551- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2552 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002553
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002554- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2555 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2556 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2557 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002558
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002559- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002560 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2561 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2562 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002563
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002564
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002565What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002566=================================
2567
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002568*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002569
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002570Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002571--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002572
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002573- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2574
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002575- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2576 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002577 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002578 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002579 a different meaning than before.
2580
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002581- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002582 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002583 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002584
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002585- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002586 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002587 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002588
2589- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2590 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2591 and deallocation.
2592
2593- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2594 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2595
2596- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2597 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2598 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2599 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2600 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2601
2602- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2603 now detected by the garbage collector.
2604
2605- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2606 [SF bug 519621]
2607
2608- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2609 identifier.
2610
2611- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2612 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2613 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2614 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2615 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2616 [SF bug 563060]
2617
2618- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2619 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2620 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2621 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2622 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2623
2624- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2625 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2626 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2627
2628- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2629
2630- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2631 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2632 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2633 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2634 state of the slots would be lost.)
2635
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002636Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002637-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002638
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002639- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002640 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2641 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2642 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2643 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002644 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2645 Jython 2.1.
2646
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002647- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002648 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002649 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2650 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2651 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2652 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2653 these, see PEP 302.
2654
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002655- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2656 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2657 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2658
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002659- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2660 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2661 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2662
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002663- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2664 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2665 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2666
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002667- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2668 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2669 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2670 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2671 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2672 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2673 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2674 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2675 releases or implementations.
2676
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002677- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002678 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2679 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002680
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002681- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2682 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2683
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002684- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2685 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2686 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2687
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002688- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2689 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2690
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002691- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2692 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002693 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2694 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002695
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002696- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2697 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2698 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2699 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2700 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2701
2702 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2703 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2704 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2705 pattern.
2706
2707 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2708 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2709 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2710 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2711
2712 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2713 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2714 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2715 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2716 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2717 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2718
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002719- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2720 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2721 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2722 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2723 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2724 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2725 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2726 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002727
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002728- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2729 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2730 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2731 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2732 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002733 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2734 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2735 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2736 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2737 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2738 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2739 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002740
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002741- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2742 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2743
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002744- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2745 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2746 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2747 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2748 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2749 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2750 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2751 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2752 to Zack Weinberg!
2753
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002754- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2755 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2756 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2757 type. This has been fixed now.
2758
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002759- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2760 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2761 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2762
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002763- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2764 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2765 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2766 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2767 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2768 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2769 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2770 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002771 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002772
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002773- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2774 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2775 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002776
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002777- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2778 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2779 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2780 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2781 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2782 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2783 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2784 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002785 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002786 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2787 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2788
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002789- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2790 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2791 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2792 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2793 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2794 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2795 this.)
2796
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002797- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2798 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002799 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002800 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002801 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2802 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002803 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2804 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002805
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002806- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2807 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2808 currently running.
2809
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002810- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2811 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2812 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2813 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2814
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002815- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2816 as directory names.
2817
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002818- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2819 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2820
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002821- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2822 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2823
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002824- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002825 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2826 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002827
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002828- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2829 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2830 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2831 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2832 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2833
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002834- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2835 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2836 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2837 removed.
2838
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002839- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2840 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2841 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2842
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002843- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2844 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2845 to __debug__.
2846
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002847- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2848 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2849 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2850
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002851- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2852 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2853 deprecated now.
2854
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002855- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2856 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2857 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002858
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002859- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2860 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2861 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2862 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2863 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002864
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002865- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2866 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2867
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002868- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2869 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2870 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002871 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002872 is backward compatible.
2873
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002874- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2875 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2876 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2877 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2878 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2879
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002880- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2881 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2882 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2883 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2884 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2885 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002886
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002887- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2888 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2889
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002890- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2891 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2892
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002893- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2894 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2895 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2896 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2897 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2898
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002899- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2900 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2901 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2902
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002903- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002904 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2905
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002906- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2907 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2908 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002909
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002910- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2911 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2912
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002913- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2914 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2915 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2916
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002917- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2918
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002919Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002920-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002921
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002922- Added three operators to the operator module:
2923 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2924 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2925 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2926
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002927- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2928
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002929- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2930 archives.
2931
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002932- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2933 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2934 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2935
2936 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2937
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002938- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2939 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2940 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002941 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002942
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002943- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2944 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2945 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2946 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002947 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2948 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2949 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2950 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002951
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002952- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2953 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002954
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002955- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2956
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002957- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2958 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2959
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002960- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2961 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2962 supported.
2963
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002964- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2965
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002966- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2967 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002968
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002969- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2970 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2971
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002972- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2973
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002974- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2975 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2976
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002977- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2978 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2979 functions but callable type objects.
2980
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002981- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002982 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002983 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002984
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002985- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2986 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002987
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002988- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2989 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002990
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002991- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2992 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2993 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2994 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2995
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002996- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2997 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002998
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002999- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3000 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3001 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3002 and __imul__.
3003
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003004- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003005 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3006 is called.
3007
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003008- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3009 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3010 interpreter was compiled.
3011
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003012- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3013 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3014 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003015 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003016 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3017 1, not 2.
3018
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003019- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3020 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3021 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3022 limit.
3023
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003024- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3025 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3026 bug #623464.
3027
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003028- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3029 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3030 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3031 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3032
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003033Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003034-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003035
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003036- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3037
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003038- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3039 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3040 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3041 with Python 2.3a2.
3042
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003043- os.path exposes getctime.
3044
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003045- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003046 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003047 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003048 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003049 unit tests of floating point results.
3050
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003051- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3052 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3053 has been increased.
3054
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003055- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3056 executed.
3057
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003058- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3059 postinstallation script.
3060
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003061- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3062 test the current module.
3063
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003064- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003065 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3066 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3067 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3068 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3069
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003070- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003071 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003072 Ward's Optik package.
3073
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003074- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3075 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3076 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3077 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3078
3079- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3080 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003081 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003082
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003083- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3084 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3085 shelf are binary pickles.
3086
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003087- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3088 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3089
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003090- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3091 modules are iterators now.
3092
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003093- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3094 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3095 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3096 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3097 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3098 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003099
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003100- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3101 with their entity value.
3102
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003103- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3104
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003105- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3106 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003107
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003108- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3109 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003110 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003111
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003112- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3113 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3114 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3115 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3116 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3117 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3118 main():
3119
3120 import locale
3121 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3122
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003123- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3124 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3125
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003126- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3127 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3128 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3129 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3130 to the new standard.
3131
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003132- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3133 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3134 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3135 an extension to the database.
3136
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003137- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3138 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3139 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3140 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003141 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003142
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003143- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003144 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003145
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003146- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3147 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3148 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3149 bounded integers.
3150
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003151- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3152 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3153 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3154 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3155 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3156 in existence.
3157
3158 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3159 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3160 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3161 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3162 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3163 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3164
3165 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3166 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3167 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3168 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3169
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003170- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3171 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3172 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3173
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003174- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3175
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003176- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3177 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3178 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3179 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3180
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003181- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3182 argument.
3183
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003184- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3185 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3186 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3187 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3188 [SF patch 560794].
3189
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003190- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3191 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3192 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003193 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3194 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3195 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003196
3197- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3198 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003199
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003200- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3201 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3202 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3203 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003204
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003205- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3206 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3207 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3208 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3209 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3210
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003211- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003212
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003213- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3214
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003215- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3216 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3217 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3218 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3219 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3220 identical to None.
3221
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003222- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3223 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3224 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3225 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3226 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3227 results now.
3228
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003229- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3230 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3231
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003232- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3233 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3234 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3235 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3236 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3237 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3238 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3239 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3240
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003241- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3242
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003243- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3244 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3245
3246- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3247 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3248 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3249 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3250 and other systems.
3251
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003252- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3253 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3254 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3255 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 +00003256 work well with these.
3257
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003258- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3259
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003260- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003261 connections.
3262
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003263- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3264 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3265 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3266
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003267- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3268 sets
3269
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003270- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3271 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3272 name.
3273
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003274- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3275 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3276 passed in.
3277
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003278- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003279 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003280 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3281 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003282
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003283- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3284
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003285- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3286
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003287- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3288 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3289 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3290
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003291- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3292 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3293 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3294 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003295 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003296
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003297- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003298 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003299 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003300
3301- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3302 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3303 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3304
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003305- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003306 the value of its expression argument.
3307
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003308- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3309 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3310 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3311
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003312- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3313 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3314 skipstone browser was included.
3315
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003316- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3317 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3318
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003319Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003321
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003322- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3323 names in addition to accepting file names.
3324
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003325- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3326 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3327 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3328 still used and useful.)
3329
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003330- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3331 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3332 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3333 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003334
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003335- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3336 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3337 the generated binary.
3338
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003339Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003341
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003342- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3343
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003344- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3345 except in the hands of experts.
3346
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003347- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003348 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3349 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3350 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003351
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003352- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3353 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3354 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3355 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3356 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3357 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3358 builds.
3359
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003360- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3361 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3362 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3363 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3364 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3365 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3366 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3367 new type.
3368
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003369- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003370
3371 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3372 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3373 positive infinities.
3374
3375 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3376 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3377 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3378 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3379 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3380 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3381 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3382
3383 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3384
3385 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3386
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003387- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3388 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3389 size of the executable.
3390
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003391- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3392 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3393 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3394 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003395
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003396- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3397
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003398- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3399 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3400 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003401
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003402- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3403 well as Unix.
3404
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003405- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3406 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3407 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3408 modules in the README file for details.
3409
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003410C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003412
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003413- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3414 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003415 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003416 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003417 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003418
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003419- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3420 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3421 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3422 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3423 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3424 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003425 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003426 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3427 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3428 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3429 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3430 aligned.)
3431
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003432- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3433 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3434 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3435
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003436- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3437 level.
3438
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003439- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3440 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3441 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3442 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3443 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3444
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003445- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3446 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3447 code.
3448
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003449- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3450 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3451 adjusting for negative indices.
3452
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003453- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3454 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3455 object.
3456
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003457- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3458 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3459 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3460
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003461- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3462 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003463
3464- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3465
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003466- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3467 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3468 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3469 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3470
3471- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3472
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003473- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003474
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003475- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003476 without going through the buffer API.
3477
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003479
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003480- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3481 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3482 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3483 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3484
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003485- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3486 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3487
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003488- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003489 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3490
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003491New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003492-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003493
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003494- OpenVMS is now supported.
3495
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003496- AtheOS is now supported.
3497
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003498- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3499
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003500- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003502Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----
3504
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003505- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3506 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3507 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003508
3509Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003511
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003512- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3513 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3514 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3515 bugs.
3516 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003517 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003518 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3519 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003520 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003521
3522- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003523 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003524
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003525- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3526 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3527
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003528- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3529 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003530 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003531 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3532
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003533- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3534 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3535 use files" uninstall option).
3536
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003537- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3538
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003539- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3540 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3541
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003542- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3543 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3544 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3545
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003546- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3547 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3548 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3549 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3550 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003551 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3552 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3553 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003554
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003555- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003556 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003557 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3558 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3559 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3560 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3561 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3562 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3563 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3564 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3565 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3566 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3567 work around.
3568
3569- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3570 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3571 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3572 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3573 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3574 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3575 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3576 specified with O_CREAT too).
3577
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003578Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579----
3580
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003581- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003582
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003583- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3584 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3585 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3586
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003587- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3588 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3589 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3590
3591- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3592 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3593 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3594 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3595 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3596 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3597 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3598 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003599
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003600- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3601 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3602 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003603
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003604- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3605 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3606 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3607 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3608 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003609
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003610- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3611 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3612 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003613
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003614- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3615 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003616
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003617- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3618 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3619 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3620 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3621 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003622
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003623- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3624 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3625 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3626
3627- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3628 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3629 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003630
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003631- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3632 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3633 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3634 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003635 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003636
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003637- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3638 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003639
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003640- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3641 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003642
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003643- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003644 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003645 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3646 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003647
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003648
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003649What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003650===============================
3651
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3653
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003654Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003656
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003657- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3658 with a custom metaclass.
3659
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003660Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003661-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003662
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003663- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3664 are proxies.
3665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003666Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003668
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003669- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3670 very short strings.
3671
3672- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3673 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3674 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3675 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3676 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3677
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003678Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003680
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003681- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3682 close or delete time).
3683
3684- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3685 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3686
3687- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3688
3689- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003690 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003691
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003692Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003694
3695Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003697
3698C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003700
3701New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003703
3704Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003706
3707Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003709
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003710- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3711
3712- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3713 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3714
3715- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3716 deleted at process exit time.
3717
3718- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3719 in backslash.
3720
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003721Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003723
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003724- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3725 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3726 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3727
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003728
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003729What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003730===========================
3731
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3733
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003734Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003735--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003736
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003737- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3738 been extensively updated. See
3739
3740 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3741
3742 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3743
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003744- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3745 deleted!
3746
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003747- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3748 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3749 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3750 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3751 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3752
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003753- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3754
3755 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3756 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3757
3758 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3759 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3760 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3761 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3762 supported anyway.
3763
3764 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3765 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3766
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003767- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3768 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3769 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3770 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3771 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003772
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003773- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3774 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3775 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3776
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003777Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003779
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003780- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3781 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3782 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3783 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3784 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3785 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003786 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3787 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3788 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3789 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003790
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003791- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3792 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3793 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3794
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003795Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003797
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003798- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3799
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003800Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003802
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003803- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3804 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3805 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3806 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3807 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3808 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3809
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003810- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3811
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003812- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3813
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003814- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3815
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003816- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3817 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3818 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3819
3820- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3821
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003822Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003824
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003825- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3826 off a search on Google.
3827
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003828Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003829-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003830
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003831- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3832 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3833 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3834 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3835 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3836 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3837 other platforms should do likewise.
3838
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003839- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3840 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3841 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3842
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003843C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003845
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003846- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3847 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3848 producing key-value pairs.
3849
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003850- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003851 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003852 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3853 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3854 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3855 previously went unchallenged.
3856
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003857New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003859
3860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003862
3863Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003865
3866Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003868
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003869- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3870 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003871
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003872- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3873 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3874 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3875 home.
3876
3877
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003878What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003879===========================
3880
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3882
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003883Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003885
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003886- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3887 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003888
3889 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003890 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003891
3892 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3893 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003894 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003895 This needs to be documented.
3896
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003897- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3898 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3899
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003900- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3901 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3902 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3903
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003904- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3905 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3906
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003907- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3908 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3909 class forbids it).
3910
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003911- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3912 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3913 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3914
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003915- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3916
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003917Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003919
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003920- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3921 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003922 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003923
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003924- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3925 (like 1 + '').
3926
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003927Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003929
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003930- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3931 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3932 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3933 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003934 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003935 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3936
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003937- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3938 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3939 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3940 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3941
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003942- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3943 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003944 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3945 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3946 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003947
3948- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3949 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003950
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003951- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3952 bytes on its input.
3953
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003954Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003956
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003957- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003958 convenience function.
3959
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003960- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3961 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3962 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003963 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3964 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3965 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3966 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3967 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3968 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003969
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003970- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3971 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3972 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3973 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3974
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003975- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3976 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3977 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3978
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003979- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3980 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3981 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3982 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3983
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003984- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3985 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003987 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3988 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3989 new -l and -e options.
3990
3991- statcache is now deprecated.
3992
3993- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3994 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003996 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3997 time properly taken into account.
3998
3999- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4000 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4001 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4002 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4003
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004004Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004006
4007Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004009
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004010- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4011 is built with libdb3 if available.
4012
4013- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4014
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004015C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004016-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004017
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004018- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4019 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4020 PySequence_Size().
4021
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004022- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4023
4024- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4025 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4026 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4027
4028- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4029 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4030
4031- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4032 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4033
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004034New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004036
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004037- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4038 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4039
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004040- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4041 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4042
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004043- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004045Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004047
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004048- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4049 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4050
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004051Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004053
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004054Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004056
4057- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4058 removed completely in the next release.
4059
4060- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4061 OSX.
4062
4063- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4064 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4065
4066- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4067
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004068
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004069What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004070===========================
4071
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4073
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004074Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004076
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004077- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004078 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004079 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004080 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4081 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004082 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4083 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004084 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4085 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004086
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004087- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4088 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4089
4090- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4091 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4092
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004093Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004095
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004096- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4097 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4098 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4099 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4100 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4101 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4102 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4103 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4104
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004105- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4106 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4107 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4108 example).
4109
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004110- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004111 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004112 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004113 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004114
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004115- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4116 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4117 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004118 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004119
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004120- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4121 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4122 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4123 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4124 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4125 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4126
4127 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4128
4129 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4130
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004131Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004133
4134- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4135
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004136- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4137
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004138- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4139 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004140
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004141- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4142 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4143 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4144 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4145 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4146 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004147 attributes.
4148
4149- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4150 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4151 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004152
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004153- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4154 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4155 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004156
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004157- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4158 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4159 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004160 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4161 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4162
4163- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4164 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004165
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004166Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004168
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004169- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4170 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4171
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004172- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4173 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4174 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4175 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4176
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004177- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4178 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4179 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4180 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4181
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004182 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4183 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4184 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4185 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4186 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4187 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4188 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4189 without losing information).
4190
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004191- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004192 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4193 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4194 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4195 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4196 module).
4197
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004198 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004199 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4200 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4201 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4202 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004203
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004204- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004205 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4206 encoding.
4207
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004208- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4209 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004212 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4213
4214- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4215 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4216 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4217 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4218
4219- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4220
4221- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4222 ON, and OFF.
4223
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004224- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4225 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4226
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004227Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004229
4230- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4231 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4232 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004233
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004234- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4235 been added: -X and -E.
4236
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004237Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004239
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004240- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4241 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4242
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004243C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004245
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004246- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4247 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4248 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4249 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4250 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4251
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004252- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4253 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4254 as long) arguments.
4255
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004256- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4257 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4258 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4259 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4260 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4261 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4262
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004263- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4264 input.
4265
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004266New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004268
4269Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004271
4272Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004274
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004275- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4276 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4277 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4278
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004279- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4280 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4281 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004282 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004283
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4285 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4286 import signal
4287 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004290 while 1:
4291 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004292 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004293 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4294 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4295 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4296 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004297
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004298
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004299What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4300===========================
4301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4303
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004304Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004306
4307- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4308 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4309 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4310
4311- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4312 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4313 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4314 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4315 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4316 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4317 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004318
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004319- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004320 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004321 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4322 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4323 associate a docstring with a property.
4324
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004325- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4326 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4327 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4328 other built-in object types.
4329
4330- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4331 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4332 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4333 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4334 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4335
4336- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4337 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4338
4339- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4340 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004341 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004342 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4343 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4344 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4345 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4346 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4347
4348- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4349 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4350 class.
4351
4352- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4353 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4354 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4355 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4356
4357- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4358 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4359 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4360 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4361
4362- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4363 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4364
4365- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4366 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4367 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4368 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4369 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004370 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004371 with the same value as s.
4372
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004373- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4374
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004375Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004377
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004378- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4379
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004380- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4381 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4382 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4383 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4384 objects.
4385
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004386- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4387 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004388 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4389 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4390
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004391- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4392 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4393 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4394
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004395Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004397
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004398- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4399 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4400 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4401 by the instances.
4402
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004403- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4404 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4405 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4406
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004407- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4408 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4409 before the entire comparison is complete.
4410
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004411- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4412 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4413 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4414
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004415- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4416 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4417 getwriter().
4418
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004419- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4420 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4421
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004422- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004423 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4424 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4425
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004426- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4427 iterable object.
4428
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004429- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4430 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004431
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004432- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4433 authentication.
4434
4435- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4436 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004437
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004438- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004439 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4440 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4441 a sample driver.)
4442
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004443Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004445
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004446- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4447 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4448 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4449 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4450 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4451 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4452 kernel has large file support.
4453
4454- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4455 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4456 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4457 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4458 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4459
4460- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4461 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4462 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4463
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004464C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004466
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004467- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4468 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4469
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004470New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004472
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004473- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4474 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4475
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004476Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004477-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004478
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004479- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4480 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4481 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4482 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4483 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4484
4485- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4486 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4487 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4488 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4489
4490- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4491 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4492
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004493Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004494-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004495
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004496- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004497 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4498 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004499
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004500
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004501What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4502===========================
4503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4505
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004506Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004507----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004508
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004509- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4510 big to represent as a C double.
4511
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004512- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4513 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4514 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4515 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4516 restriction).
4517
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004518- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4519 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4520 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4521 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4522 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4523
4524 >>> dir([])
4525 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4526 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4527 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4528 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4529 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4530 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4531 'reverse', 'sort']
4532
4533 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4534
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004535- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004536 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4537 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4538 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4539 OverflowError exception.
4540
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004541- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004542 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004543 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4544 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4545 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4546 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4547 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004548 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4550 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4551
4552 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4553 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4554 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4555 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004556
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004557- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004558 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4559 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4560 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4561 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4562 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4563 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4564 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4565 once it is created.
4566
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004567- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4568 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4569 (key, value) pairs.
4570
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004571- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004572 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4573 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4574
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004575- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4576 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4577 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4578 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4579 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004580
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004581- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004582 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4583 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4584
4585 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4586
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004587- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004588 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4589
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004590Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004591-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004592
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004593- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004594 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4595 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004596
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004597- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4598 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4599 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4600 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4601 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4602 in this area anymore).
4603
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004604- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4605 threading.Timer.
4606
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004607- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4608 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4609
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004610- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004611 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4612
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004613- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004614 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4615 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4616 converted to Python longs.
4617
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004618- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004619 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4620
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004621- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4622 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4623 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4624
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004625Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004627
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004628- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4629 division operators as per PEP 238.
4630
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004631Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004632-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004633
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004634- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4635 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4636 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4637 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4638
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004639C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004641
4642- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004643
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004644- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4645 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004646 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004647
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4649 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004650 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004652
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004653- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004654 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4655 module:
4656
4657 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004658
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004659 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4660 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004661
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004662 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4663 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004664
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004665 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4666
4667 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4668
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004669- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004670 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4671 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4672 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004673
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004674New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004675-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004676
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004677- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4678 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4679 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4680 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4681 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004682
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004683Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004685
4686Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004688
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004689- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4690 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4691 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4692 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004693 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4694 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4695 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4696 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4697 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004698
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004699- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004700 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4701
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004702
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004703What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4704===========================
4705
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4707
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004708Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004709-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004710
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004711- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4712 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4713
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004714- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4715 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4716 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004717
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004718- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4719 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4720 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4721 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004722
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004723- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004725- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004726
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004727Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004728-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004729
4730- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004731 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004732 the module docstring for details.
4733
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004734Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004736
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004737- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004738 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4739 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4740 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004741
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004742- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4743 Nick Mathewson.
4744
4745Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004747
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004748- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4749 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4750 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4751 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4752 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4753 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4754 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4755 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4756
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004757- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4758 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4759 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4760 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4761
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004762- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4763 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4764 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4765 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4766 come a long way).
4767
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004768- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4769 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4770 write filters for these warnings).
4771
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004772- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4773 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4774 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4775 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4776 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4777
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004778- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4779 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4780 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4781 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4782 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4783 older distribution.
4784
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004785Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004786-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004787
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004788- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4789 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004790 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004791
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004792- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4793 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4794 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4795
4796- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4797
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004798- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4799
4800- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4801
4802- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4803
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004805
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004806- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4807
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004808New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004809-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004810
4811C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004813
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004814- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4815 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4816 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4817 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4818 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4819 against buffer overruns.
4820
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004821- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004822 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4823 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004824 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4825 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4826 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4827
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004828- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4829 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4830 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4831 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4832 deprecated.
4833
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004834Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004835-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004836
4837- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4838 relevant is found.
4839
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004840
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004841What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004842===========================
4843
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4845
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004846Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004848
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004849- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4850 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4851 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4852 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4853 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4854 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4855 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4856 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004857 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004858 repaired.
4859
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004860- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004861 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004862 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4863 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4864 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4865 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4866 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4867 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4868 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4869 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4870
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004871- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4872 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4873 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4874 leading BMO character).
4875
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004876- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4877 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4878 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4879
4880 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4881 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4882 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004883
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004884 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4885 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4886 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4887 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4888 for various simple to use conversions.
4889
4890 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4891 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004893 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4894 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4895 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4896 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4897 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4898 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4899 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4900 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4901 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4902 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4903 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4904 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4905 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4906 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4907 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004908
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004909- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4910 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4911 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004912 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004913 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004914
4915 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004916 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4917 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4918 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4919 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4920 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004921 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4922 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004923
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004924 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4925 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4926 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004927 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004928
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004929- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4930 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4931 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4932 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4933 floating arithmetic,
4934
4935 x = 9007199254740992.0
4936 print long(x)
4937
4938 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4939 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4940 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4941 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4942 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4943 functions are of good quality).
4944
4945 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4946 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4947 algorithms to break.
4948
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004949- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4950 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4951 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4952 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4953 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4954 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4955 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4956 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4957 order.
4958
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004959- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4960 operation along the most common code paths.
4961
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004962- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4963 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4964
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004965- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4966 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4967 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4968 {}.update(UserDict())
4969
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004970- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4971 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4972 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4973 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4974 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4975 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4976 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4977 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4978
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004979- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004980 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004981
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004982 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004983 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4984 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004985 join() method of strings
4986 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004987 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4988 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004990 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004991
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004992- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4993 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4994
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004995- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4996 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4997
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004998- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4999 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5000 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5001 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5002
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005003- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5004 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005005 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005006 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5007 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005008
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005009- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5010
5011
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005012Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005014
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005015- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005016 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005017 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5018 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5019
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005020- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5021 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5022
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005023- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5024 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5025 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5026 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5027
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005028- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5029 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5030 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5031
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005032- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5033
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005034- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5035
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005036- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5037 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5038 that are still imported into string.py).
5039
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005040- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5041
5042- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5043 Now it does.
5044
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005045- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5046
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005047- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5048 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5049 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5050 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5051 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005052 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5053 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005054
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005055- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5056 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5057 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5058 'help(object)'.
5059
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005060Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005062
5063- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005064 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005065 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5066 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5067
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005068- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005069 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5070 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005071
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005072C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005074
5075- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5076 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077
5078----
5079
5080**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**