blob: f44e10d3075f9653683f04d573d385f380caf8fa [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +00005What's New in Python 2.4 release candidate 1?
6=============================================
7
8Library
9-------
10
11- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
12 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
13 raised is re-raised.
14
15
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +000016(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
17
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000018What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
19================================
20
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +000021*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000022
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +000023License
24-------
25
26The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
27is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
28changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
29Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
30intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
31durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
32the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
33License::
34
35 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
36
37says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
38to Python 2.1.1.
39
40The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
41License Version 2.
42
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000043Core and builtins
44-----------------
45
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +000046- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
47 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
48 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
49 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
50 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
51 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
52 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
53 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
54 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
55 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
56
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +000057- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000058
59Extension Modules
60-----------------
61
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +000062- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
63 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
64 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
65 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000066
67Library
68-------
69
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +000070- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
71 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
72 returned.
73
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +000074- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
75
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +000076- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
77 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
78
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +000079- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
80
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +000081- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
82 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000083
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +000084- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
85
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +000086- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
87
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +000088- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +000089 the source code is updated and reloaded.
90
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000091Build
92-----
93
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +000094- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000095
96C API
97-----
98
99...
100
101Documentation
102-------------
103
104...
105
106Tests
107-----
108
109...
110
111Windows
112-------
113
114...
115
116Mac
117---
118
119...
120
121New platforms
122-------------
123
124...
125
126Tools/Demos
127-----------
128
129...
130
131
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000132What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
133================================
134
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000135*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000136
137Core and builtins
138-----------------
139
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000140- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000141 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
142
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000143- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
144 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
145 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
146 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
147
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000148- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
149 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
150
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000151- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
152 constant.
153
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000154- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
155 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
156 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
157 large), and to anomalies such as
158 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
159 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
160 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
161 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000162
163Extension modules
164-----------------
165
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000166- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
167 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000168 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
169 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
170 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000171
172Library
173-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000174
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000175- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000176 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000177 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
178 --swig-cpp.
179
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000180- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
181 it is set.
182
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000183- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000184
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000185- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
186 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
187 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
188 Closes bug #1039270.
189
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000190- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000191
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000192 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000193 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
194 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
195 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
196 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
197 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
198 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
199 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
200 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
201 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
202 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
203 + Updates to documentation.
204
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000205- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
206 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
207 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
208 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
209
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000210- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000211
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000212- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
213 applications should use the getmember function.
214
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000215- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
216
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000217- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
218 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
219 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
220 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
221 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
222 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
223 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
224 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
225 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
226
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000227- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
228 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000229 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000230
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000231- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
232 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
233 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
234 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
235 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
236 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
237 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
238 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000239
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000240- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
241 the new public features (of which there are many).
242
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000243- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000244 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
245 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
246 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
247 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000248 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000249
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000250- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
251
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000252- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
253 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
254 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
255 options.
256
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000257- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
258 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
259 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
260 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
261 conditions under which non-string values work.
262
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000263Build
264-----
265
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000266- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
267 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
268 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
269
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000270- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
271 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
272 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
273 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
274 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000275
276C API
277-----
278
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000279- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
280 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
281
282- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
283
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000284- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
285 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
286 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
287 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
288 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
289 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
290 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
291 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
292 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
293
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000294- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
295
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000296- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
297 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
298 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000299
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000300Tests
301-----
302
303- test__locale ported to unittest
304
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000305Mac
306---
307
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000308- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
309 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
310 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000311
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000312Tools/Demos
313-----------
314
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000315- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
316 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
317 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
318 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
319 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000320
321
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000322What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
323=================================
324
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000325*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000326
327Core and builtins
328-----------------
329
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000330- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000331 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
332
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000333- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
334 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
335 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
336 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
337 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
338 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
339 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
340 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000341 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
342 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
343 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
344 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
345 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000346
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000347- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
348 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
349 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
350 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
351 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
352
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000353- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
354
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000355- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
356 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
357
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000358- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
359 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
360 modified the list.
361
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000362- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
363 functions is now writable.
364
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000365- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
366 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
367 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
368 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
369
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000370- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
371 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
372 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
373 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
374 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000375
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000376- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
377 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
378
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000379Extension modules
380-----------------
381
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000382- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
383
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000384- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
385 data.
386
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000387- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
388 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
389 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
390 supposed to have been truncated away.
391
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000392- Added socket.socketpair().
393
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000394- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
395 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
396
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000397- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000398 versions of Python, have now been removed.
399
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000400Library
401-------
402
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000403- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000404 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000405
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000406- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
407 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
408
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000409- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
410 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
411
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000412- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
413
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000414- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
415 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000416
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000417- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
418 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
419
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000420- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
421
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000422- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
423
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000424- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
425
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000426- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
427 Percivall.
428
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000429- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
430 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
431
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000432- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
433 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
434 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000435 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000436
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000437- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
438 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
439 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
440 and exponent.
441
442- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
443
444- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
445 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
446 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
447
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000448- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
449 to the readline module.
450
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000451- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000452 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
453 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000454
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000455- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
456 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
457 contains symlinks.
458
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000459- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
460 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
461
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000462- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
463 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
464 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
465
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000466- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
467 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
468 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
469 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
470 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
471 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
472 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
473 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
474 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
475 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
476 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
477 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
478 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
479
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000480- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
481
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000482Tools/Demos
483-----------
484
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000485- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
486 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
487
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000488- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
489
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000490Build
491-----
492
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000493- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
494 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
495 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
496 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
497 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
498 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
499 plans to do so.
500
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000501- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
502 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
503
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000504- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
505 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
506
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000507- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
508 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
509
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000510- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
511 GNU/k*BSD systems.
512
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000513- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
514 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
515
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000516C API
517-----
518
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000519..
520
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000521Documentation
522-------------
523
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000524- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
525 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
526
527- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
528 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
529 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000530
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000531New platforms
532-------------
533
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000534- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
535
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000536Tests
537-----
538
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000539..
540
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000541Windows
542-------
543
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000544- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
545 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
546 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
547 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
548 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
549 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
550 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
551 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
552 the problem.
553
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000554Mac
555---
556
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000557..
558
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000559
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000560What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
561=================================
562
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000563*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000564
565Core and builtins
566-----------------
567
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000568- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
569 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
570 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
571 sensitive code.
572
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000573- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000574 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000575
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000576 @staticmethod
577 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000578
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000579 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000580
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000581- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
582 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
583 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
584 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
585 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
586 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
587 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
588 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
589 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
590 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
591 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
592
593 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
594 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
595 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
596 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
597 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
598 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
599 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
600
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000601- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
602 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
603
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000604- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000605 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000606
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000607- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000608 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000609 which was missing for no apparent reason.
610
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000611- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000612 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
613 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
614
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000615- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
616 types that support garbage collection.
617
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000618- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
619
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000620- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
621 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
622 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
623 Jython.
624
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000625- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
626
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000627- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
628 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
629
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000630- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
631 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
632 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000633
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000634- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
635 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
636 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
637
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000638Extension modules
639-----------------
640
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000641- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
642
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000643Library
644-------
645
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000646- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
647 TIS-620
648
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000649- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
650 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
651 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
652 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
653 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
654 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
655 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
656 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
657 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
658 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
659
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000660- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
661
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000662- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
663 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
664 same as when the argument is omitted).
665 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
666
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000667- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
668
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000669- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
670 schemes are offered.
671
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000672- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
673
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000674- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
675 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
676 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
677
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000678- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
679
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000680- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
681 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
682
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000683- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
684 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
685 when dummy_threading is being used.
686
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000687- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
688 from a tarfile.
689
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000690- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000691 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000692
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000693- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
694 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
695 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
696 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
697
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000698- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
699 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
700
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000701- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
702 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
703 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
704 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
705 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
706 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
707 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
708 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
709 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
710 by some other method in progress).
711
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000712- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
713 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
714 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000715
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000716- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
717
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000718- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
719 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
720 AM Kuchling.
721
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000722- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
723 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
724 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
725
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000726- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
727 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
728 instead of unsigned.
729
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000730- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000731 no longer part of the public API.
732
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000733- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
734 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
735 string methods of the same name).
736
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000737- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000738 SF patch 945642.
739
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000740- doctest unittest integration improvements:
741
742 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
743
744 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
745 DocTestSuites.
746
747- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
748 that provide thread-local data.
749
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000750- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
751 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
752
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000753- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
754
755- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
756 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
757 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
758
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000759- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
760
761 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
762 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
763 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000764
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000765 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
766 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
767 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
768 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
769
770 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
771 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
772
773 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
774 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
775 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
776 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
777
778 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
779 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
780 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
781 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
782 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
783
784 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
785 wrapping help output.
786
787 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
788 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
789 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000790
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000791C API
792-----
793
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000794- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
795 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
796 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
797 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
798 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
799 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
800 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
801 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
802 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
803 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
804 its visible semantics have not changed.
805
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000806- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
807 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
808
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000809Documentation
810-------------
811
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000812- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000813
814 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000815 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000816
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000817 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000818
819 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
820
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000821- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000822
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000823Tests
824-----
825
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000826- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000827 platforms that use the Makefile.
828
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000829- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
830 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
831 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
832
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000833
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000834What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
835=================================
836
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000837*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000838
839Core and builtins
840-----------------
841
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000842- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
843 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
844 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
845 objects now (one object instead of three).
846
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000847- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
848 Windows DLLs.
849
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000850- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
851 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000852
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000853- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
854 a new .pyc magic.
855
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000856- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
857 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
858 be there.
859
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000860- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
861 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
862 the LC_NUMERIC category.
863
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000864- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
865 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
866 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
867
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000868- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
869
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000870- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
871 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
872 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000873
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000874- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
875 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
876
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000877- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
878
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000879- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000880 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000881
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000882- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
883
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000884- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
885
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000886- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
887 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
888
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000889- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
890 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
891 Fixes bug #858016 .
892
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000893- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
894 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
895 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
896
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000897- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
898 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
899 improves their performance (about 35%).
900
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000901- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
902 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
903 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
904
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000905- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
906 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
907 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
908 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
909
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000910- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
911 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
912 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
913 length is not known).
914
915- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
916 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000917 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
918 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000919 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
920
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000921- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
922 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
923
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000924- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
925 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
926 keyword arguments.
927
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000928- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
929 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
930 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
931
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000932- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
933 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
934 cases.
935
936- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
937 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
938 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
939 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
940 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
941 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
942 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
943 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
944 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
945 a release build.
946
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000947- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
948 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
949
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000950- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000951 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000952
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000953- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
954 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
955 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
956 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
957 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
958 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
959 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
960 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
961 destroyed.
962
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000963- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
964 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
965 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
966 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
967 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
968 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
969 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
970 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
971
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000972- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
973 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
974 character other than a space.
975
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000976- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
977 by the function object or by the method object, the function
978 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
979 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
980 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
981 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
982 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
983 attributes with the same name.
984
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000985- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
986 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
987 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
988 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
989 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
990 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
991 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
992 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
993 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
994 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
995 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
996 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
997 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
998 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000999
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001000- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1001 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1002 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1003 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1004 This has been repaired.
1005
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001006- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1007
1008- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1009
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001010- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1011 over a sequence.
1012
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001013- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001014 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001015
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001016- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1017
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001018- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1019 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1020 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1021 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1022 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1023 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1024 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1025 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1026
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001027- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1028 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1029 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1030
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001031- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1032 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1033 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1034 freelist.
1035
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001036- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1037 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1038
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001039- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1040 number.
1041
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001042- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1043 a TypeError exception.
1044
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001045- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1046 820195.
1047
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001048- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1049 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1050 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1051
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001052- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001053 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1054 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001055
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001056- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1057 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1058 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1059
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001060- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1061 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001062 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001063
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001064- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001065 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1066 the first call.
1067
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001068
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001069Extension modules
1070-----------------
1071
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001072- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1073 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1074
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001075- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1076 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1077 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1078 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1079 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1080 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1081 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001082
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001083- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1084
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001085- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1086
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001087- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1088 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1089
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001090- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1091 fewer false positives.
1092
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001093- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1094 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1095
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001096- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001097 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1098
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001099- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001100 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001101 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001102 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1103 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001104
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001105- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1106 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1107 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1108 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1109
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001110- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1111 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1112 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1113 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1114 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1115 #897625.
1116
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001117- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1118 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1119
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001120- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1121 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1122 and pops on either side of the deque.
1123
1124- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1125 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1126
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001127- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1128 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1129 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1130 other functions that expect a function argument.
1131
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001132- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1133
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001134- os.getsid was added.
1135
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001136- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1137 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1138 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1139
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001140- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1141
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001142- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1143
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001144- readline.clear_history was added.
1145
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001146- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1147
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001148- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1149
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001150- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1151
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001152- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1153
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001154- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1155
1156- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1157
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001158- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1159
1160- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1161
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001162- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1163 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1164 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1165
1166- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1167 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1168 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1169 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1170 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1171 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1172 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1173
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001174- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1175 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1176 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1177 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001178
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001179- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001180 iterators from a single iterable.
1181
1182- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1183 of raising a TypeError exception.
1184
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001185- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1186 as parameter.
1187
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001188Library
1189-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001190
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001191- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1192 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1193 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001194
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001195- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1196 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1197 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001198
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001199- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001200
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001201- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1202 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001203
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001204- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1205 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1206
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001207- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1208
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001209- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001210 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001211
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001212- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001213 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001214
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001215- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1216
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001217- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1218 on cygwin and mingw32.
1219
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001220- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1221
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001222- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1223 module.
1224
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001225- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1226 installation scheme for all platforms.
1227
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001228- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001229 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001230
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001231- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1232 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1233 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1234
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001235- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1236 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1237 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1238
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001239- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1240
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001241- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1242
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001243- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1244 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1245
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001246- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1247 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1248 type pattern with the same value exists.
1249
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001250- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1251 when run from the command prompt).
1252
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001253- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1254 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1255
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001256- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1257 default sort).
1258
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001259- Added global runctx function to profile module
1260
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001261- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1262
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001263- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1264
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001265- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1266
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001267- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001268 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1269 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1270 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1271 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1272 accordingly.
1273
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001274- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1275 decoding standards.
1276
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001277- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1278 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1279 called for all requests.
1280
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001281- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1282 they are passed to the compiler.
1283
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001284- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1285 indent, width and depth.
1286
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001287- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1288 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1289
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001290- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1291 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1292
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001293- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1294
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001295- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1296
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001297- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1298
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001299- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1300 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1301
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001302- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001303 for better performance.
1304
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001305- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001306
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001307- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1308 a string).
1309
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001310- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1311
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001312- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1313
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001314- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1315
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001316- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1317
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001318- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1319 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1320 list of fieldnames.
1321
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001322- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1323 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1324
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001325- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1326
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001327- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1328 empty lists.
1329
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001330- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1331 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1332 and shelves.
1333
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001334- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1335 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1336
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001337- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001338 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1339 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001340
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001341- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1342 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001343 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001344
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001345- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001346 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1347 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1348
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001349- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1350 and removed in Py2.4.
1351
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001352- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1353
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001354- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1355
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001356Tools/Demos
1357-----------
1358
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001359- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1360 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1361
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001362- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1363
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001364- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1365 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1366 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1367 destination in situations where both files are given.
1368
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001369- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1370 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1371 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1372 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1373
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001374- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1375
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001376- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1377 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1378 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1379 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1380 now.
1381
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001382- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1383 in effect
1384
1385- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1386 C-c C-h
1387
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001388- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1389 -d option was given.
1390
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001391Build
1392-----
1393
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001394- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1395 build under OS X.
1396
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001397- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1398 --enable-profiling.
1399
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001400- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1401 is configured --with-tsc.
1402
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001403- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1404 on AMD64.
1405
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001406- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1407 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1408
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001409- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1410 removed.
1411
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001412- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1413 supported (see PEP 11).
1414
1415- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1416
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001417- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1418
1419- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1420 (see PEP 11).
1421
1422- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1423 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1424
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001425C API
1426-----
1427
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001428- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1429 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1430 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1431
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001432- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1433 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1434 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1435 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1436
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001437- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1438 generator objects.
1439
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001440- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1441 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001442 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1443 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001444
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001445- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1446 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1447
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001448- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1449 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1450 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1451 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1452 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1453
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001454- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1455 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1456 about 10% faster.
1457
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001458- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1459 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1460
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001461- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1462 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1463 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1464 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1465
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001466Windows
1467-------
1468
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001469- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1470 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1471 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1472 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1473
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001474- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1475 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1476 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1477
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001478
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001479What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1480===============================
1481
1482*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1483
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001484IDLE
1485----
1486
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001487- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1488 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1489 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1490 context-menu actions.
1491
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001492- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1493 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1494 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1495 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1496 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1497 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1498 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1499 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1500 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1501
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001502
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001503What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1504=============================================
1505
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001506*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001507
1508Core and builtins
1509-----------------
1510
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001511- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001512 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001513 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1514
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001515Extension modules
1516-----------------
1517
1518- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1519 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1520 than once. This has been fixed.
1521
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001522- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1523 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1524 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1525 call.
1526
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001527- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1528
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001529Library
1530-------
1531
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001532- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1533 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1534
1535- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1536 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1537 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1538 restored.
1539
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001540IDLE
1541----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001542
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001543- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001544
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001545Build
1546-----
1547
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001548- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1549 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1550
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001551C API
1552-----
1553
1554Windows
1555-------
1556
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001557- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1558 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1559
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001560- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1561
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001562Mac
1563---
1564
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001565- Various fixes to pimp.
1566
1567- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1568
1569- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1570 more problems than it solves.
1571
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001572
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001573What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1574=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001575
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001576*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1577
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001578Core and builtins
1579-----------------
1580
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001581- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1582 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1583
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001584- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1585 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001586 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001587
1588- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1589 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1590 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001591 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001592
1593- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1594 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001595
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001596- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1597 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1598 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1599
1600- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001601 770247.
1602
1603- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001604
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001605Extension modules
1606-----------------
1607
1608- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1609 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1610
1611- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1612
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001613- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1614
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001615- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1616 contained within the _strptime module.
1617
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001618- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1619 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1620
1621- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001622 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1623
1624- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1625 the find_class attribute, if present.
1626
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001627- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001628
1629 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1630 (SF bug 763298).
1631
1632 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001633 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1634 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1635 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001636
1637 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1638
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001639Library
1640-------
1641
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001642- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1643
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001644- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1645 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1646 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1647 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1648 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1649 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1650 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1651 or Tester().
1652
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001653- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1654 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1655 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1656 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1657 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1658 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1659 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1660 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1661 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001662
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001663 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001664
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001665- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1666 weren't before was an oversight.
1667
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001668- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1669 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1670
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001671- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1672 when there are no lines.
1673
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001674- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1675 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1676
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001677- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1678 to child processes.
1679
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001680- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1681
1682- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1683
1684- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1685 xmlrpclib.
1686
1687- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1688 responses.
1689
1690- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1691 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1692
1693- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1694 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1695 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1696
1697- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1698 used as patterns.
1699
1700- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1701 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1702 than Tk 8.3.
1703
1704- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1705
1706- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001707
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001708Tools/Demos
1709-----------
1710
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001711- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1712
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001713- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1714
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001715- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001716
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001717Build
1718-----
1719
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001720- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1721
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001722- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1723
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001724- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1725 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001726
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001727- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1728 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1729 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001730
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001731C API
1732-----
1733
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001734- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1735 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1736
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001737Windows
1738-------
1739
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001740- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1741 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1742 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1743 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1744 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1745 Python exception ::
1746
1747 thread.error: can't start new thread
1748
1749 is raised now.
1750
1751- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1752 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1753 instead of from DLL teardown.
1754
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001755Mac
1756---
1757
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001758- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001759 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001760 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1761 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1762 the executable in the bundle.
1763
1764- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001765
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001766- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1767
1768- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1769 on Panther.
1770
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001771What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1772================================
1773
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001774*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001775
1776Core and builtins
1777-----------------
1778
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001779- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1780 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1781 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1782 with the -i option.
1783
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001784- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1785 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1786
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001787- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1788 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1789
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001790- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1791 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1792 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1793 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1794 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1795 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1796 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1797 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1798 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1799 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1800 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1801 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1802 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001803
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001804- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1805 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1806 embedded in a lambda expression.
1807
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001808- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1809 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1810 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1811 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1812 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1813
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001814- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1815 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1816 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1817
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001818- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1819 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1820
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001821- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1822 It's writable again.
1823
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001824- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1825 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1826 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001827 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001828
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001829- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1830 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1831 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1832
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001833Extension modules
1834-----------------
1835
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001836- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1837 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1838
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001839- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1840 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1841 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1842 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1843
1844- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1845 collection.
1846
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001847- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1848 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1849 unique within a single program run.
1850
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001851- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1852 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1853
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001854- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1855 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1856
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001857- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1858 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001859
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001860- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1861
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001862- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1863 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1864
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001865- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1866 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1867 for many BSD-derived systems.
1868
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001869
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001870Library
1871-------
1872
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001873- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1874 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1875 primary ones:
1876
1877 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1878 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1879 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1880
1881 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1882 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1883 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1884 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1885 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1886 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1887
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001888- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1889 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1890 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1891 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1892 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1893 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1894 argument.
1895
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001896- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1897 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1898 in the archive.
1899
1900- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1901 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1902
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001903- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1904 569574).
1905
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001906- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1907 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1908 no more.
1909
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001910- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1911 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1912 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1913 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1914 code coverage.
1915
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001916- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1917 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1918 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001919 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1920 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001921
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001922- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1923 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1924 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001925 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001926
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001927- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1928
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001929- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1930 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1931 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1932 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1933
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001934- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1935 handling.
1936
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001937- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1938 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1939
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001940- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1941 in socket.py.
1942
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001943- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1944
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001945- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1946 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1947 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1948 opener with proxy support.
1949
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001950- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1951
1952- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1953
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001954Tools/Demos
1955-----------
1956
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001957- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1958
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001959- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1960
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001961- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1962 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001963
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001964- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1965 files.
1966
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001967Build
1968-----
1969
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001970- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001971 different root directory.
1972
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001973C API
1974-----
1975
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001976- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1977 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1978 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1979 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1980 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1981 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1982 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1983 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1984 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1985 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1986
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001987- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1988 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1989 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1990 from Python.
1991
1992
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001993New platforms
1994-------------
1995
1996None this time.
1997
1998Tests
1999-----
2000
2001- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2002 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2003
2004Windows
2005-------
2006
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002007- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2008
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002009- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2010 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2011 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2012 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2013 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2014 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2015 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2016 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2017 that's what it's for.
2018
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002019Mac
2020---
2021
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002022- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2023 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2024 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2025 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002026- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2027 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2028- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002029
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002030SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2031------------------------------------
2032
2033430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2034598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2035622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2036661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2037683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2038697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2039713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2040724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2041727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2042729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2043730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2044731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2045732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2046733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2047735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2048740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2049744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2050745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2051747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2052749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2053751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2054753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2055755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2056757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2057760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2058
2059
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002060What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2061================================
2062
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002063*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002064
2065Core and builtins
2066-----------------
2067
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002068- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2069 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2070
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002071- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2072 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2073 and cannot be strings).
2074
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002075- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2076 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2077 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2078 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2079
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002080- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2081 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2082 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2083 Python itself.
2084
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002085- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2086 the referenced object, if it has one.
2087
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002088- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2089 the thread started at
2090 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2091
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002092- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2093 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2094 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2095 placed on a list index.
2096
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002097- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2098 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2099 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2100 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2101
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002102- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2103 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2104 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2105 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2106 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2107 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2108 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2109
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002110- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2111 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2112 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2113 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2114 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2115
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002116- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2117 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002118
2119- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2120 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2121 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2122 #693195.)
2123
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002124- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2125 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002126
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002127- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002128 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002129 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2130 interpreter executions, would fail.
2131
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002132- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002133 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002134 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002135
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002136Extension modules
2137-----------------
2138
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002139- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2140 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2141 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2142 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2143
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002144- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2145 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2146
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002147- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2148 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2149 and Greg Chapman.)
2150
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002151- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2152 recursively.
2153
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002154- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002155 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2156 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2157 leaks.
2158
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002159- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2160
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002161- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2162 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2163 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2164 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2165 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2166 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2167 #705836.
2168
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002169- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002170 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2171
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002172- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2173 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2174 See SF bug #692416.
2175
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002176- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2177 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2178
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002179- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2180 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2181 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002182
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002183- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002184 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2185 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2186
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002187- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2188 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2189 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2190 timeouts to work properly.
2191
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002192Library
2193-------
2194
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002195- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2196 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2197 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2198 future release.
2199
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002200- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2201 for querying platform dependent features.
2202
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002203- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002204
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002205- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2206 pickle protocol versions.
2207
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002208- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2209 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2210 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2211
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002212- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2213
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002214- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2215 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2216 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2217 modules.
2218
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002219- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2220 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2221 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2222
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002223- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2224 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2225
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002226- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2227 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2228 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2229
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002230- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002231 MS Office extensions.
2232
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002233- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2234 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2235
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002236- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2237 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2238
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002239- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2240 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2241 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2242 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2243 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2244 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2245
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002246- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2247 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2248 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002249
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002250- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2251 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2252 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2253
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002254- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2255
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002256- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2257 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2258 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2259
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002260Tools/Demos
2261-----------
2262
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002263- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2264 See the module docstring for details.
2265
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002266Build
2267-----
2268
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002269- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2270 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002271
2272C API
2273-----
2274
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002275- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2276
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002277- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2278 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2279 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2280
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002281- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2282 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002283
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002284 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2285 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2286 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002287
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002288- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002289 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2290
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002291- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2292 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2293 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002294
2295New platforms
2296-------------
2297
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002298None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002299
2300Tests
2301-----
2302
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002303- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2304 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002305
2306Windows
2307-------
2308
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002309- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2310 function.
2311
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002312- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2313 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002314
2315Mac
2316---
2317
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002318- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2319 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002320
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002321- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2322 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002323
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002324- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2325 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2326 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002327
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002328- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002329 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2330 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002331
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002332- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2333 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002334
2335
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002336What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2337=================================
2338
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002339*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002340
2341Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002342-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002343
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002344- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2345 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2346 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2347
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002348- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2349 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2350 (SF patch #664376.)
2351
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002352- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2353 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2354 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2355 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2356 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2357 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002358 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002359
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002360- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2361 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2362 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2363 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002364 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002365
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002366- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2367 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2368 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2369 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2370 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2371 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2372 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2373 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2374 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2375 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2376 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2377
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002378- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2379 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2380 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2381 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2382 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2383 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2384
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002385- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2386 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2387
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002388- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2389 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2390 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2391 case.)
2392
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002393- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2394 passed as unicode strings.
2395
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002396- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2397 See SF bug #683467.
2398
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002399- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2400 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2401
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002402- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2403
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002404- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2405
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002406- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2407 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2408 arguments.
2409
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002410- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2411 See SF bug #667147.
2412
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002413- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002414 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002415 See SF bug #676155.
2416
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002417- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002418 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002419 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2420 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2421 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2422 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2423 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2424 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002425
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002426Extension modules
2427-----------------
2428
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002429- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2430 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2431 tp_as_number pointer.
2432
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002433- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2434 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2435 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2436 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2437 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2438
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002439- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2440
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002441- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2442
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002443- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002444 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002445 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2446 patch #678531.)
2447
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002448- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2449 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2450
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002451- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2452 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2453
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002454- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2455
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002456- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2457 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2458 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2459
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002460- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2461
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002462- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2463 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2464
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002465- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002466
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002467- datetime changes:
2468
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002469 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2470
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002471 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2472 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2473 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2474 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2475 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2476 now.
2477
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002478 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002479 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2480 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002481
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002482 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002483 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002484 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2485 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2486 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2487 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002488
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002489 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2490 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2491 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002492 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2493
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002494 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2495 by a later example coded by Guido.
2496
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002497 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002498 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2499 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2500 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002501 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2502 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2503
2504 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2505 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2506 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2507 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2508 tzinfo subclass instance.
2509
2510 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2511 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2512 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2513 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2514 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2515 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2516 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2517 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002518
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002519 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2520 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2521 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2522 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2523 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002524 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2525
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002526 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002527
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002528 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2529 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2530 as a naive datetime object.
2531
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002532 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2533 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2534 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2535
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002536 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2537 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2538 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2539 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2540 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2541 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2542 comparison.
2543
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002544 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2545 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2546 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2547 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002548 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002549
2550 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002551
2552 and ::
2553
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002554 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2555
2556 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2557 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2558 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2559 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2560
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002561 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2562 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2563 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2564 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2565 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2566
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002567 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2568 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002569 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2570 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002571
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002572Library
2573-------
2574
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002575- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2576 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2577
2578- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2579 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2580 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2581 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2582 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2583 See PEP 307 for details.
2584
2585- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2586 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2587
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002588- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2589 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002590 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002591 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2592 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002593 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002594
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002595- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2596 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2597
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002598- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2599 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2600 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2601
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002602- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2603
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002604- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2605 exception.
2606
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002607- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2608 class.
2609
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002610- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2611 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2612 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2613
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002614- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2615 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2616
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002617- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002618 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2619 See SF bug #659228.
2620
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002621- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2622 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2623 See SF patch #651082.
2624
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002625- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002626
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002627- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2628 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2629
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002630- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002631 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002632
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002633- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2634 DOS paths from other platforms.
2635
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002636Tools/Demos
2637-----------
2638
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002639- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2640 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2641 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2642 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2643 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2644 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2645 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2646 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2647 example:
2648
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002649 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2650 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002651
2652 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2653
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002654
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002655Build
2656-----
2657
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002658- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2659 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2660 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002661 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2662
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002663 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2664
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002665- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2666 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2667 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2668 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2669 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2670 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2671 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2672 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2673 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2674
2675- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2676 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2677 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2678 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2679
2680- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2681 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2682
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002683C API
2684-----
2685
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002686- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2687 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002688
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002689- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2690 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2691 tp_as_number pointer.
2692
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002693- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2694 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2695 (SF #681367)
2696
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002697- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2698 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2699 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2700 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002701
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002702Tests
2703-----
2704
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002705- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002706 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2707 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2708 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2709 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2710 pydoc.)
2711
2712- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2713
2714- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002715
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002716Windows
2717-------
2718
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002719- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2720 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2721 time).
2722
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002723- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2724 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2725
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002726- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2727 release without strong cryptography.
2728
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002729- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002730 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002731
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002732- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2733 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002735Mac
2736---
2737
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002738- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2739 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002740
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002741- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2742 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2743 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002744
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002745- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2746 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002747
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002748- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2749 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2750 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2751 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002752
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002753- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002754 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2755 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2756 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002757
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002758
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002759What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002760=================================
2761
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002762*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002763
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002764Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002765--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002766
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002767- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2768
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002769- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2770 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002771 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002772 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002773 a different meaning than before.
2774
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002775- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002776 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002777 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002778
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002779- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002780 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002781 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002782
2783- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2784 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2785 and deallocation.
2786
2787- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2788 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2789
2790- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2791 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2792 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2793 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2794 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2795
2796- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2797 now detected by the garbage collector.
2798
2799- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2800 [SF bug 519621]
2801
2802- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2803 identifier.
2804
2805- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2806 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2807 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2808 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2809 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2810 [SF bug 563060]
2811
2812- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2813 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2814 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2815 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2816 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2817
2818- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2819 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2820 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2821
2822- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2823
2824- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2825 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2826 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2827 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2828 state of the slots would be lost.)
2829
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002830Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002831-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002832
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002833- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002834 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2835 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2836 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2837 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002838 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2839 Jython 2.1.
2840
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002841- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002842 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002843 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2844 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2845 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2846 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2847 these, see PEP 302.
2848
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002849- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2850 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2851 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2852
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002853- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2854 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2855 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2856
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002857- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2858 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2859 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2860
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002861- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2862 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2863 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2864 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2865 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2866 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2867 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2868 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2869 releases or implementations.
2870
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002871- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002872 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2873 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002874
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002875- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2876 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2877
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002878- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2879 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2880 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2881
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002882- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2883 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2884
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002885- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2886 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002887 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2888 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002889
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002890- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2891 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2892 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2893 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2894 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2895
2896 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2897 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2898 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2899 pattern.
2900
2901 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2902 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2903 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2904 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2905
2906 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2907 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2908 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2909 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2910 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2911 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2912
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002913- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2914 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2915 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2916 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2917 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2918 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2919 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2920 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002921
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002922- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2923 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2924 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2925 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2926 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002927 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2928 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2929 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2930 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2931 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2932 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2933 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002934
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002935- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2936 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2937
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002938- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2939 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2940 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2941 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2942 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2943 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2944 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2945 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2946 to Zack Weinberg!
2947
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002948- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2949 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2950 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2951 type. This has been fixed now.
2952
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002953- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2954 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2955 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2956
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002957- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2958 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2959 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2960 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2961 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2962 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2963 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2964 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002965 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002966
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002967- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2968 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2969 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002970
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002971- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2972 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2973 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2974 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2975 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2976 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2977 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2978 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002979 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002980 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2981 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2982
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002983- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2984 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2985 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2986 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2987 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2988 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2989 this.)
2990
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002991- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2992 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002993 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002994 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002995 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2996 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002997 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2998 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002999
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003000- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3001 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3002 currently running.
3003
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003004- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3005 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3006 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3007 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3008
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003009- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3010 as directory names.
3011
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003012- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3013 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3014
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003015- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3016 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3017
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003018- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003019 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3020 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003021
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003022- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3023 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3024 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3025 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3026 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3027
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003028- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3029 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3030 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3031 removed.
3032
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003033- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3034 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3035 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3036
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003037- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3038 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3039 to __debug__.
3040
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003041- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3042 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3043 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3044
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003045- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3046 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3047 deprecated now.
3048
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003049- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3050 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3051 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003052
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003053- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3054 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3055 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3056 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3057 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003058
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003059- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3060 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3061
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003062- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3063 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3064 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003065 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003066 is backward compatible.
3067
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003068- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3069 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3070 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3071 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3072 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3073
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003074- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3075 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3076 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3077 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3078 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3079 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003080
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003081- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3082 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3083
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003084- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3085 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3086
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003087- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3088 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3089 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3090 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3091 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3092
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003093- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3094 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3095 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3096
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003097- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003098 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3099
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003100- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3101 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3102 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003103
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003104- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3105 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3106
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003107- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3108 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3109 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3110
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003111- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3112
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003113Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003115
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003116- Added three operators to the operator module:
3117 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3118 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3119 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3120
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003121- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3122
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003123- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3124 archives.
3125
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003126- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3127 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3128 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3129
3130 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3131
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003132- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3133 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3134 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003135 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003136
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003137- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3138 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3139 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3140 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003141 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3142 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3143 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3144 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003145
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003146- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3147 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003148
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003149- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3150
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003151- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3152 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3153
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003154- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3155 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3156 supported.
3157
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003158- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3159
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003160- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3161 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003162
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003163- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3164 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3165
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003166- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3167
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003168- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3169 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3170
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003171- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3172 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3173 functions but callable type objects.
3174
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003175- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003176 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003177 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003178
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003179- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3180 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003181
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003182- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3183 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003184
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003185- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3186 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3187 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3188 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3189
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003190- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3191 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003192
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003193- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3194 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3195 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3196 and __imul__.
3197
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003198- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003199 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3200 is called.
3201
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003202- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3203 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3204 interpreter was compiled.
3205
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003206- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3207 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3208 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003209 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003210 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3211 1, not 2.
3212
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003213- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3214 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3215 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3216 limit.
3217
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003218- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3219 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3220 bug #623464.
3221
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003222- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3223 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3224 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3225 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3226
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003227Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003229
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003230- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3231
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003232- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3233 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3234 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3235 with Python 2.3a2.
3236
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003237- os.path exposes getctime.
3238
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003239- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003240 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003241 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003242 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003243 unit tests of floating point results.
3244
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003245- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3246 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3247 has been increased.
3248
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003249- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3250 executed.
3251
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003252- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3253 postinstallation script.
3254
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003255- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3256 test the current module.
3257
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003258- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003259 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3260 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3261 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3262 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3263
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003264- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003265 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003266 Ward's Optik package.
3267
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003268- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3269 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3270 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3271 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3272
3273- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3274 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003275 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003276
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003277- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3278 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3279 shelf are binary pickles.
3280
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003281- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3282 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3283
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003284- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3285 modules are iterators now.
3286
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003287- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3288 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3289 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3290 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3291 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3292 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003293
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003294- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3295 with their entity value.
3296
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003297- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3298
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003299- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3300 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003301
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003302- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3303 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003304 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003305
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003306- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3307 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3308 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3309 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3310 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3311 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3312 main():
3313
3314 import locale
3315 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3316
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003317- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3318 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3319
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003320- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3321 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3322 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3323 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3324 to the new standard.
3325
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003326- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3327 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3328 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3329 an extension to the database.
3330
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003331- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3332 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3333 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3334 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003335 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003336
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003337- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003338 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003339
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003340- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3341 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3342 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3343 bounded integers.
3344
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003345- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3346 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3347 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3348 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3349 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3350 in existence.
3351
3352 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3353 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3354 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3355 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3356 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3357 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3358
3359 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3360 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3361 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3362 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3363
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003364- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3365 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3366 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3367
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003368- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3369
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003370- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3371 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3372 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3373 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3374
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003375- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3376 argument.
3377
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003378- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3379 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3380 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3381 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3382 [SF patch 560794].
3383
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003384- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3385 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3386 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003387 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3388 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3389 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003390
3391- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3392 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003393
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003394- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3395 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3396 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3397 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003398
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003399- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3400 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3401 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3402 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3403 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3404
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003405- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003406
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003407- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3408
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003409- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3410 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3411 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3412 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3413 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3414 identical to None.
3415
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003416- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3417 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3418 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3419 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3420 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3421 results now.
3422
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003423- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3424 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3425
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003426- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3427 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3428 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3429 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3430 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3431 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3432 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3433 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3434
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003435- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3436
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003437- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3438 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3439
3440- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3441 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3442 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3443 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3444 and other systems.
3445
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003446- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3447 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3448 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3449 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 +00003450 work well with these.
3451
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003452- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3453
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003454- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003455 connections.
3456
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003457- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3458 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3459 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3460
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003461- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3462 sets
3463
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003464- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3465 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3466 name.
3467
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003468- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3469 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3470 passed in.
3471
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003472- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003473 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003474 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3475 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003476
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003477- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3478
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003479- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3480
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003481- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3482 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3483 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3484
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003485- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3486 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3487 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3488 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003489 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003490
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003491- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003492 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003493 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003494
3495- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3496 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3497 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3498
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003499- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003500 the value of its expression argument.
3501
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003502- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3503 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3504 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3505
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003506- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3507 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3508 skipstone browser was included.
3509
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003510- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3511 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3512
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003513Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003515
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003516- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3517 names in addition to accepting file names.
3518
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003519- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3520 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3521 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3522 still used and useful.)
3523
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003524- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3525 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3526 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3527 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003528
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003529- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3530 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3531 the generated binary.
3532
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003533Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003535
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003536- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3537
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003538- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3539 except in the hands of experts.
3540
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003541- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003542 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3543 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3544 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003545
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003546- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3547 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3548 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3549 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3550 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3551 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3552 builds.
3553
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003554- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3555 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3556 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3557 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3558 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3559 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3560 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3561 new type.
3562
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003563- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003564
3565 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3566 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3567 positive infinities.
3568
3569 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3570 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3571 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3572 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3573 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3574 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3575 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3576
3577 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3578
3579 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3580
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003581- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3582 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3583 size of the executable.
3584
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003585- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3586 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3587 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3588 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003589
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003590- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3591
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003592- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3593 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3594 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003595
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003596- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3597 well as Unix.
3598
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003599- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3600 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3601 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3602 modules in the README file for details.
3603
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003604C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003606
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003607- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3608 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003609 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003610 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003611 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003612
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003613- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3614 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3615 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3616 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3617 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3618 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003619 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003620 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3621 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3622 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3623 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3624 aligned.)
3625
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003626- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3627 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3628 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3629
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003630- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3631 level.
3632
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003633- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3634 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3635 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3636 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3637 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3638
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003639- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3640 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3641 code.
3642
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003643- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3644 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3645 adjusting for negative indices.
3646
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003647- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3648 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3649 object.
3650
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003651- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3652 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3653 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3654
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003655- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3656 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003657
3658- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3659
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003660- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3661 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3662 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3663 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3664
3665- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3666
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003667- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003668
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003669- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003670 without going through the buffer API.
3671
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003673
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003674- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3675 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3676 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3677 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3678
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003679- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3680 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3681
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003682- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003683 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3684
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003685New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003686-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003687
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003688- OpenVMS is now supported.
3689
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003690- AtheOS is now supported.
3691
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003692- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3693
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003694- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3695
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003696Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697-----
3698
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003699- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3700 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3701 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003702
3703Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003705
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003706- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3707 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3708 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3709 bugs.
3710 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003711 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003712 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3713 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003714 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003715
3716- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003717 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003718
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003719- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3720 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3721
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003722- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3723 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003724 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003725 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3726
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003727- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3728 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3729 use files" uninstall option).
3730
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003731- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3732
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003733- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3734 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3735
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003736- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3737 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3738 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3739
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003740- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3741 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3742 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3743 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3744 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003745 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3746 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3747 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003748
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003749- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003750 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003751 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3752 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3753 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3754 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3755 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3756 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3757 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3758 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3759 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3760 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3761 work around.
3762
3763- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3764 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3765 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3766 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3767 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3768 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3769 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3770 specified with O_CREAT too).
3771
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003772Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773----
3774
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003775- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003776
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003777- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3778 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3779 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3780
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003781- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3782 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3783 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3784
3785- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3786 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3787 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3788 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3789 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3790 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3791 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3792 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003793
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003794- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3795 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3796 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003797
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003798- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3799 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3800 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3801 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3802 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003803
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003804- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3805 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3806 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003807
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003808- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3809 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003810
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003811- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3812 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3813 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3814 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3815 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003816
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003817- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3818 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3819 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3820
3821- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3822 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3823 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003824
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003825- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3826 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3827 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3828 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003829 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003830
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003831- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3832 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003833
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003834- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3835 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003836
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003837- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003838 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003839 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3840 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003841
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003842
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003843What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003844===============================
3845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003846*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3847
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003848Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003850
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003851- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3852 with a custom metaclass.
3853
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003854Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003856
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003857- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3858 are proxies.
3859
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003860Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003862
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003863- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3864 very short strings.
3865
3866- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3867 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3868 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3869 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3870 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3871
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003872Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003874
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003875- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3876 close or delete time).
3877
3878- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3879 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3880
3881- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3882
3883- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003884 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003885
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003886Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003887-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003888
3889Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003890-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003891
3892C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003894
3895New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003896-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003897
3898Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003900
3901Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003903
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003904- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3905
3906- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3907 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3908
3909- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3910 deleted at process exit time.
3911
3912- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3913 in backslash.
3914
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003915Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003917
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003918- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3919 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3920 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3921
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003922
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003923What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003924===========================
3925
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3927
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003928Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003930
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003931- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3932 been extensively updated. See
3933
3934 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3935
3936 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3937
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003938- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3939 deleted!
3940
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003941- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3942 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3943 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3944 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3945 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3946
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003947- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3948
3949 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3950 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3951
3952 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3953 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3954 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3955 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3956 supported anyway.
3957
3958 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3959 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3960
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003961- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3962 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3963 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3964 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3965 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003966
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003967- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3968 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3969 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3970
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003971Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003973
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003974- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3975 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3976 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3977 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3978 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3979 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003980 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3981 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3982 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3983 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003984
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003985- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3986 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3987 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3988
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003989Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003991
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003992- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3993
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003994Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003996
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003997- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3998 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3999 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4000 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4001 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4002 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4003
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004004- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4005
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004006- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4007
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004008- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4009
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004010- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4011 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4012 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4013
4014- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4015
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004016Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004018
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004019- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4020 off a search on Google.
4021
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004022Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004024
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004025- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4026 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4027 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4028 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4029 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4030 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4031 other platforms should do likewise.
4032
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004033- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4034 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4035 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4036
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004037C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004039
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004040- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4041 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4042 producing key-value pairs.
4043
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004044- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004045 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004046 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4047 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4048 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4049 previously went unchallenged.
4050
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004051New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004053
4054Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004056
4057Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004059
4060Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004062
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004063- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4064 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004065
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004066- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4067 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4068 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4069 home.
4070
4071
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004072What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004073===========================
4074
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4076
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004077Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004079
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004080- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4081 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004082
4083 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004084 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004085
4086 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4087 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004088 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004089 This needs to be documented.
4090
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004091- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4092 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4093
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004094- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4095 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4096 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4097
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004098- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4099 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4100
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004101- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4102 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4103 class forbids it).
4104
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004105- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4106 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4107 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4108
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004109- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4110
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004111Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004113
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004114- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4115 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004116 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004117
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004118- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4119 (like 1 + '').
4120
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004121Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004123
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004124- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4125 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4126 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4127 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004128 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004129 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4130
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004131- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4132 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4133 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4134 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4135
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004136- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4137 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004138 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4139 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4140 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004141
4142- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4143 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004144
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004145- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4146 bytes on its input.
4147
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004148Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004150
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004151- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004152 convenience function.
4153
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004154- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4155 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4156 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004157 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4158 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4159 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4160 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4161 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4162 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004163
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004164- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4165 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4166 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4167 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4168
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004169- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4170 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4171 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4172
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004173- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4174 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4175 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4176 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4177
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004178- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4179 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004181 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4182 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4183 new -l and -e options.
4184
4185- statcache is now deprecated.
4186
4187- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4188 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004189 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004190 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4191 time properly taken into account.
4192
4193- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4194 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4195 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4196 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4197
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004198Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004200
4201Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004203
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004204- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4205 is built with libdb3 if available.
4206
4207- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4208
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004209C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004210-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004211
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004212- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4213 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4214 PySequence_Size().
4215
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004216- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4217
4218- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4219 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4220 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4221
4222- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4223 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4224
4225- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4226 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4227
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004228New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004230
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004231- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4232 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4233
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004234- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4235 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4236
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004237- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4238
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004239Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004240-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004241
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004242- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4243 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4244
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004245Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004247
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004248Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004250
4251- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4252 removed completely in the next release.
4253
4254- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4255 OSX.
4256
4257- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4258 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4259
4260- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4261
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004262
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004263What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004264===========================
4265
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4267
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004268Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004270
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004271- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004272 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004273 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004274 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4275 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004276 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4277 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004278 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4279 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004280
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004281- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4282 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4283
4284- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4285 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4286
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004287Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004288-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004289
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004290- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4291 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4292 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4293 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4294 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4295 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4296 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4297 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4298
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004299- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4300 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4301 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4302 example).
4303
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004304- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004305 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004306 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004307 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004308
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004309- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4310 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4311 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004312 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004313
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004314- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4315 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4316 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4317 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4318 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4319 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4320
4321 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4322
4323 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4324
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004325Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004327
4328- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4329
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004330- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4331
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004332- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4333 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004334
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004335- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4336 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4337 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4338 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4339 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4340 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004341 attributes.
4342
4343- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4344 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4345 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004346
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004347- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4348 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4349 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004350
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004351- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4352 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4353 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004354 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4355 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4356
4357- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4358 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004359
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004360Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004362
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004363- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4364 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4365
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004366- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4367 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4368 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4369 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4370
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004371- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4372 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4373 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4374 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4375
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004376 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4377 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4378 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4379 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4380 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4381 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4382 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4383 without losing information).
4384
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004385- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004386 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4387 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4388 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4389 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4390 module).
4391
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004392 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004393 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4394 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4395 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4396 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004397
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004398- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004399 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4400 encoding.
4401
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004402- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4403 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4404
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004406 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4407
4408- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4409 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4410 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4411 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4412
4413- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4414
4415- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4416 ON, and OFF.
4417
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004418- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4419 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4420
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004421Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004422-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004423
4424- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4425 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4426 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004427
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004428- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4429 been added: -X and -E.
4430
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004431Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004433
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004434- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4435 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4436
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004437C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004439
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004440- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4441 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4442 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4443 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4444 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4445
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004446- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4447 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4448 as long) arguments.
4449
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004450- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4451 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4452 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4453 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4454 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4455 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4456
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004457- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4458 input.
4459
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004460New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004461-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004462
4463Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004465
4466Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004467-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004468
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004469- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4470 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4471 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4472
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004473- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4474 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4475 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004476 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004477
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4479 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4480 import signal
4481 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004482
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004483 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004484 while 1:
4485 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004486 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004487 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4488 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4489 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4490 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004491
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004492
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004493What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4494===========================
4495
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4497
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004498Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004500
4501- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4502 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4503 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4504
4505- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4506 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4507 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4508 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4509 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4510 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4511 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004512
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004513- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004514 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004515 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4516 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4517 associate a docstring with a property.
4518
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004519- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4520 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4521 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4522 other built-in object types.
4523
4524- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4525 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4526 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4527 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4528 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4529
4530- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4531 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4532
4533- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4534 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004535 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004536 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4537 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4538 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4539 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4540 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4541
4542- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4543 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4544 class.
4545
4546- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4547 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4548 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4549 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4550
4551- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4552 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4553 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4554 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4555
4556- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4557 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4558
4559- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4560 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4561 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4562 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4563 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004564 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004565 with the same value as s.
4566
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004567- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4568
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004569Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004571
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004572- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4573
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004574- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4575 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4576 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4577 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4578 objects.
4579
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004580- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4581 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004582 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4583 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4584
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004585- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4586 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4587 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4588
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004589Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004591
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004592- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4593 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4594 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4595 by the instances.
4596
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004597- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4598 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4599 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4600
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004601- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4602 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4603 before the entire comparison is complete.
4604
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004605- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4606 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4607 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4608
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004609- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4610 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4611 getwriter().
4612
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004613- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4614 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4615
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004616- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004617 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4618 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4619
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004620- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4621 iterable object.
4622
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004623- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4624 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004625
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004626- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4627 authentication.
4628
4629- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4630 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004631
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004632- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004633 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4634 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4635 a sample driver.)
4636
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004637Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004638-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004639
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004640- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4641 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4642 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4643 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4644 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4645 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4646 kernel has large file support.
4647
4648- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4649 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4650 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4651 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4652 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4653
4654- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4655 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4656 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4657
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004658C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004660
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004661- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4662 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4663
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004664New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004665-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004666
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004667- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4668 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4669
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004670Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004672
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004673- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4674 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4675 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4676 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4677 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4678
4679- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4680 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4681 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4682 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4683
4684- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4685 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4686
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004687Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004689
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004690- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004691 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4692 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004693
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004694
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004695What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4696===========================
4697
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4699
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004700Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004702
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004703- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4704 big to represent as a C double.
4705
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004706- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4707 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4708 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4709 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4710 restriction).
4711
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004712- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4713 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4714 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4715 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4716 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4717
4718 >>> dir([])
4719 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4720 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4721 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4722 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4723 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4724 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4725 'reverse', 'sort']
4726
4727 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4728
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004729- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004730 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4731 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4732 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4733 OverflowError exception.
4734
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004735- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004736 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004737 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4738 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4739 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4740 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4741 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004742 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004743 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4744 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4745
4746 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4747 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4748 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4749 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004750
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004751- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004752 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4753 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4754 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4755 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4756 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4757 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4758 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4759 once it is created.
4760
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004761- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4762 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4763 (key, value) pairs.
4764
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004765- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004766 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4767 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4768
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004769- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4770 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4771 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4772 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4773 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004774
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004775- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004776 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4777 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4778
4779 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4780
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004781- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004782 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4783
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004784Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004786
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004787- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004788 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4789 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004790
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004791- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4792 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4793 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4794 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4795 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4796 in this area anymore).
4797
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004798- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4799 threading.Timer.
4800
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004801- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4802 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4803
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004804- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004805 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4806
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004807- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004808 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4809 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4810 converted to Python longs.
4811
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004812- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004813 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4814
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004815- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4816 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4817 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4818
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004819Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004820-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004821
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004822- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4823 division operators as per PEP 238.
4824
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004825Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004827
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004828- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4829 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4830 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4831 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4832
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004833C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004835
4836- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004837
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004838- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4839 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004840 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004841
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4843 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004844 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004846
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004847- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004848 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4849 module:
4850
4851 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004852
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004853 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4854 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004855
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004856 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4857 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004858
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004859 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4860
4861 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4862
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004863- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004864 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4865 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4866 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004867
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004868New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004870
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004871- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4872 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4873 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4874 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4875 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004876
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004877Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004879
4880Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004882
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004883- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4884 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4885 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4886 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004887 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4888 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4889 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4890 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4891 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004892
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004893- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004894 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4895
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004896
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004897What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4898===========================
4899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4901
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004902Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004904
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004905- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4906 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4907
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004908- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4909 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4910 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004911
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004912- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4913 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4914 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4915 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004916
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004917- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4918
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004920
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004921Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004922-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004923
4924- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004925 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004926 the module docstring for details.
4927
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004928Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004929-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004930
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004931- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004932 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4933 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4934 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004935
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004936- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4937 Nick Mathewson.
4938
4939Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004941
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004942- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4943 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4944 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4945 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4946 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4947 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4948 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4949 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4950
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004951- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4952 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4953 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4954 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4955
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004956- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4957 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4958 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4959 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4960 come a long way).
4961
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004962- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4963 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4964 write filters for these warnings).
4965
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004966- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4967 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4968 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4969 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4970 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4971
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004972- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4973 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4974 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4975 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4976 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4977 older distribution.
4978
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004979Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004981
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004982- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4983 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004984 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004985
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004986- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4987 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4988 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4989
4990- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4991
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004992- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4993
4994- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4995
4996- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4997
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004999
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005000- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5001
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005002New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005004
5005C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005006-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005007
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005008- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5009 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5010 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5011 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5012 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5013 against buffer overruns.
5014
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005015- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005016 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5017 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005018 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5019 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5020 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5021
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005022- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5023 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5024 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5025 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5026 deprecated.
5027
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005029-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005030
5031- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5032 relevant is found.
5033
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005034
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005035What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005036===========================
5037
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005038*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5039
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005040Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005041----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005042
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005043- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5044 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5045 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5046 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5047 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5048 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5049 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5050 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005051 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005052 repaired.
5053
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005054- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005055 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005056 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5057 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5058 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5059 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5060 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5061 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5062 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5063 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5064
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005065- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5066 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5067 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5068 leading BMO character).
5069
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005070- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5071 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5072 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5073
5074 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5075 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5076 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005077
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005078 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5079 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5080 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5081 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5082 for various simple to use conversions.
5083
5084 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5085 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5086
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5088 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5089 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5090 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5091 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5092 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5093 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5094 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5095 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5096 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5097 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5098 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5099 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5100 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5101 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005102
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005103- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5104 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5105 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005106 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005107 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005108
5109 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005110 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5111 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5112 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5113 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5114 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005115 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5116 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005117
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005118 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5119 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5120 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005121 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005122
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005123- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5124 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5125 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5126 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5127 floating arithmetic,
5128
5129 x = 9007199254740992.0
5130 print long(x)
5131
5132 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5133 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5134 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5135 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5136 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5137 functions are of good quality).
5138
5139 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5140 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5141 algorithms to break.
5142
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005143- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5144 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5145 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5146 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5147 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5148 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5149 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5150 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5151 order.
5152
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005153- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5154 operation along the most common code paths.
5155
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005156- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5157 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5158
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005159- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5160 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5161 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5162 {}.update(UserDict())
5163
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005164- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5165 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5166 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5167 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5168 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5169 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5170 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5171 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5172
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005173- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005174 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005175
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005176 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005177 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5178 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005179 join() method of strings
5180 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005181 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5182 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005183 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005184 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005185
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005186- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5187 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5188
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005189- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5190 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5191
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005192- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5193 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5194 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5195 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5196
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005197- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5198 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005199 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005200 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5201 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005202
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005203- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5204
5205
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005206Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005207-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005208
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005209- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005210 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005211 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5212 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5213
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005214- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5215 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5216
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005217- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5218 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5219 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5220 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5221
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005222- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5223 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5224 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5225
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005226- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5227
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005228- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5229
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005230- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5231 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5232 that are still imported into string.py).
5233
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005234- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5235
5236- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5237 Now it does.
5238
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005239- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5240
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005241- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5242 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5243 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5244 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5245 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005246 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5247 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005248
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005249- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5250 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5251 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5252 'help(object)'.
5253
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005254Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005255-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005256
5257- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005258 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005259 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5260 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5261
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005262- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005263 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5264 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005265
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005266C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005267-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005268
5269- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5270 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005271
5272----
5273
5274**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**