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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
26Extension modules
27-----------------
28
29Library
30-------
31
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000032- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
33 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
34 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
35 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
36 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
37 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
38 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
39 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
40 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
41 by some other method in progress).
42
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000043- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
44 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
45 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000046
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000047- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
48
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000049- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
50 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
51 AM Kuchling.
52
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000053- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
54 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
55 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
56
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000057- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
58 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
59 instead of unsigned.
60
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000061- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000062 no longer part of the public API.
63
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000064- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
65 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
66 string methods of the same name).
67
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000068- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
69 SF patch 982681.
70
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000071- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000072 SF patch 945642.
73
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000074Tools/Demos
75-----------
76
77Build
78-----
79
80C API
81-----
82
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000083- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
84 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
85
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000086New platforms
87-------------
88
89Tests
90-----
91
92Windows
93-------
94
95Mac
96---
97
98
99
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000100What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
101=================================
102
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000103*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000104
105Core and builtins
106-----------------
107
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000108- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
109 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
110 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
111 objects now (one object instead of three).
112
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000113- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
114 Windows DLLs.
115
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000116- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
117
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000118- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
119 a new .pyc magic.
120
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000121- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
122 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
123 be there.
124
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000125- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
126 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
127 the LC_NUMERIC category.
128
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000129- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
130 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
131 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
132
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000133- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
134
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000135- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
136 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
137 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000138
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000139- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
140 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
141
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000142- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
143
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000144- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000145 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000146
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000147- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
148
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000149- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
150
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000151- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
152 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
153
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000154- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
155 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
156 Fixes bug #858016 .
157
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000158- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
159 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
160 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
161
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000162- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
163 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
164 improves their performance (about 35%).
165
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000166- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
167 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
168 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
169
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000170- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
171 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
172 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
173 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
174
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000175- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
176 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
177 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
178 length is not known).
179
180- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
181 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000182 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
183 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000184 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
185
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000186- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
187 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
188
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000189- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
190 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
191 keyword arguments.
192
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000193- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
194 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
195 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
196
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000197- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
198 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
199 cases.
200
201- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
202 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
203 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
204 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
205 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
206 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
207 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
208 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
209 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
210 a release build.
211
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000212- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
213 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
214
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000215- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000216 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000217
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000218- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
219 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
220 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
221 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
222 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
223 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
224 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
225 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
226 destroyed.
227
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000228- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
229 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
230 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
231 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
232 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
233 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
234 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
235 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
236
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000237- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
238 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
239 character other than a space.
240
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000241- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
242 by the function object or by the method object, the function
243 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
244 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
245 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
246 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
247 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
248 attributes with the same name.
249
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000250- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
251 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
252 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
253 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
254 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
255 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
256 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
257 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
258 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
259 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
260 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
261 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
262 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
263 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000264
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000265- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
266 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
267 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
268 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
269 This has been repaired.
270
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000271- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
272
273- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
274
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000275- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
276 over a sequence.
277
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000278- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000279 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000280
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000281- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
282
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000283- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
284 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
285 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
286 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
287 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
288 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
289 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
290 records with equal keys is unchanged).
291
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000292- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
293 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
294 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
295
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000296- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
297 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
298 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
299 freelist.
300
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000301- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
302 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
303
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000304- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
305 number.
306
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000307- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
308 a TypeError exception.
309
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000310- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
311 820195.
312
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000313- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
314 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
315 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
316
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000317- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000318 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
319 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000320
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000321- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
322 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
323 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
324
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000325- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
326 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000327 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000328
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000329- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000330 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
331 the first call.
332
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000333
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000334Extension modules
335-----------------
336
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000337- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
338 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
339
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000340- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
341 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
342 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
343 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
344 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
345 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
346 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000347
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000348- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
349
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000350- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
351
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000352- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
353 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
354
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000355- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
356 fewer false positives.
357
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000358- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
359 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
360
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000361- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000362 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
363
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000364- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000365 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000366 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
367 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
368 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000369
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000370- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
371 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
372 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
373 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
374
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000375- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
376 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
377 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
378 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
379 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
380 #897625.
381
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000382- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
383 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
384
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000385- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
386 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
387 and pops on either side of the deque.
388
389- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
390 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
391
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000392- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
393 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
394 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
395 other functions that expect a function argument.
396
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000397- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
398
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000399- os.getsid was added.
400
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000401- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
402 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
403 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
404
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000405- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
406
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000407- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
408
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000409- readline.clear_history was added.
410
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000411- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
412
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000413- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
414
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000415- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
416
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000417- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
418
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000419- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
420
421- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
422
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000423- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
424
425- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
426
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000427- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
428 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
429 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
430
431- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
432 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
433 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
434 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
435 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
436 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
437 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
438
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000439- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
440 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
441 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
442 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000443
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000444- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000445 iterators from a single iterable.
446
447- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
448 of raising a TypeError exception.
449
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000450- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
451 as parameter.
452
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000453Library
454-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000455
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000456- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
457 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
458 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000459
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000460- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
461 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
462 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000463
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000464- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000465
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000466- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
467 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000468
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000469- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
470 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
471
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000472- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
473
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000474- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000475 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000476
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000477- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
478 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
479
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000480- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
481
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000482- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
483 on cygwin and mingw32.
484
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000485- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
486
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000487- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
488 module.
489
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000490- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
491 installation scheme for all platforms.
492
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000493- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000494 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000495
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000496- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
497 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
498 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
499
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000500- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
501 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
502 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
503
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000504- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
505
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000506- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
507
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000508- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
509 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
510
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000511- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
512 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
513 type pattern with the same value exists.
514
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000515- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
516 when run from the command prompt).
517
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000518- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
519 not taken into consideration when caching value.
520
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000521- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
522 default sort).
523
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000524- Added global runctx function to profile module
525
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000526- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
527
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000528- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
529
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000530- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
531
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000532- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000533 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
534 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
535 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
536 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
537 accordingly.
538
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000539- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
540 decoding standards.
541
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000542- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
543 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
544 called for all requests.
545
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000546- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
547 they are passed to the compiler.
548
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000549- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
550 indent, width and depth.
551
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000552- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
553 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
554
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000555- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
556 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
557
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000558- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
559
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000560- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
561
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000562- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
563
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000564- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
565 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
566
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000567- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000568 for better performance.
569
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000570- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000571
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000572- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
573 a string).
574
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000575- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
576
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000577- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
578
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000579- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
580
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000581- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
582
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000583- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
584 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
585 list of fieldnames.
586
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000587- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
588 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
589
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000590- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
591
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000592- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
593 empty lists.
594
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000595- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
596 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
597 and shelves.
598
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000599- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
600 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
601
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000602- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000603 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
604 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000605
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000606- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
607 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000608 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000609
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000610- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000611 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
612 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
613
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000614- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
615 and removed in Py2.4.
616
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000617- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
618
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000619- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
620
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000621Tools/Demos
622-----------
623
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000624- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
625 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
626
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000627- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
628
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000629- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
630 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
631 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
632 destination in situations where both files are given.
633
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000634- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
635 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
636 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
637 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
638
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000639- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
640
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000641- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
642 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
643 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
644 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
645 now.
646
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000647- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
648 in effect
649
650- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
651 C-c C-h
652
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000653- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
654 -d option was given.
655
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000656Build
657-----
658
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000659- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
660 build under OS X.
661
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000662- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
663 --enable-profiling.
664
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000665- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
666 is configured --with-tsc.
667
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000668- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
669 on AMD64.
670
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000671- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
672 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
673
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000674- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
675 removed.
676
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000677- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
678 supported (see PEP 11).
679
680- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
681
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000682- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
683
684- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
685 (see PEP 11).
686
687- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
688 sizeof(char) must be 1.
689
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000690C API
691-----
692
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000693- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
694 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
695 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
696
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000697- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
698 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
699 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
700 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
701
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000702- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
703 generator objects.
704
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000705- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
706 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000707 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
708 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000709
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000710- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
711 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
712
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000713- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
714 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
715 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
716 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
717 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
718
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000719- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
720 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
721 about 10% faster.
722
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000723- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
724 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
725
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000726- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
727 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
728 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
729 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
730
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000731Windows
732-------
733
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000734- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
735 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
736 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
737 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
738
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000739- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
740 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
741 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
742
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000743
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000744What's New in Python 2.3 final?
745===============================
746
747*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
748
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000749IDLE
750----
751
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000752- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
753 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
754 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
755 context-menu actions.
756
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000757- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
758 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
759 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
760 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
761 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
762 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
763 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
764 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
765 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
766
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000767
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000768What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
769=============================================
770
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000771*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000772
773Core and builtins
774-----------------
775
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000776- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000777 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000778 comment at the end are still unsupported.
779
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000780Extension modules
781-----------------
782
783- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
784 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
785 than once. This has been fixed.
786
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000787- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
788 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
789 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
790 call.
791
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000792- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
793
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000794Library
795-------
796
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000797- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
798 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
799
800- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
801 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
802 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
803 restored.
804
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000805IDLE
806----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000807
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000808- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000809
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000810Build
811-----
812
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000813- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
814 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
815
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000816C API
817-----
818
819Windows
820-------
821
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000822- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
823 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
824
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000825- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
826
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000827Mac
828---
829
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000830- Various fixes to pimp.
831
832- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
833
834- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
835 more problems than it solves.
836
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000837
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000838What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
839=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000840
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000841*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
842
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000843Core and builtins
844-----------------
845
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000846- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
847 by sys.setcheckinterval().
848
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000849- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
850 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000851 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000852
853- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
854 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
855 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000856 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000857
858- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
859 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000860
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000861- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
862 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
863 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
864
865- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000866 770247.
867
868- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000869
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000870Extension modules
871-----------------
872
873- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
874 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
875
876- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
877
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000878- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
879
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000880- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
881 contained within the _strptime module.
882
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000883- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
884 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
885
886- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000887 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
888
889- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
890 the find_class attribute, if present.
891
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000892- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000893
894 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
895 (SF bug 763298).
896
897 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000898 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
899 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
900 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000901
902 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
903
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000904Library
905-------
906
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000907- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
908
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000909- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
910 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
911 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
912 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
913 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
914 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
915 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
916 or Tester().
917
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000918- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
919 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
920 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
921 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
922 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
923 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
924 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
925 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
926 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000927
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000928 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000929
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000930- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
931 weren't before was an oversight.
932
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000933- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
934 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
935
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000936- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
937 when there are no lines.
938
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000939- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
940 which could occur with Tk 8.4
941
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000942- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
943 to child processes.
944
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000945- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
946
947- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
948
949- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
950 xmlrpclib.
951
952- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
953 responses.
954
955- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
956 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
957
958- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
959 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
960 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
961
962- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
963 used as patterns.
964
965- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
966 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
967 than Tk 8.3.
968
969- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
970
971- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000972
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000973Tools/Demos
974-----------
975
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000976- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
977
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000978- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
979
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000980- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000981
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000982Build
983-----
984
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000985- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
986
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000987- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
988
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000989- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
990 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000991
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000992- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
993 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
994 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000995
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000996C API
997-----
998
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000999- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1000 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1001
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001002Windows
1003-------
1004
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001005- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1006 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1007 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1008 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1009 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1010 Python exception ::
1011
1012 thread.error: can't start new thread
1013
1014 is raised now.
1015
1016- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1017 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1018 instead of from DLL teardown.
1019
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001020Mac
1021---
1022
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001023- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001024 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001025 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1026 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1027 the executable in the bundle.
1028
1029- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001030
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001031- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1032
1033- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1034 on Panther.
1035
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001036What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1037================================
1038
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001039*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001040
1041Core and builtins
1042-----------------
1043
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001044- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1045 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1046 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1047 with the -i option.
1048
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001049- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1050 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1051
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001052- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1053 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1054
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001055- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1056 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1057 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1058 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1059 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1060 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1061 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1062 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1063 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1064 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1065 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1066 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1067 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001068
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001069- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1070 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1071 embedded in a lambda expression.
1072
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001073- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1074 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1075 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1076 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1077 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1078
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001079- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1080 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1081 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1082
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001083- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1084 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1085
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001086- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1087 It's writable again.
1088
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001089- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1090 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1091 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001092 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001093
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001094- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1095 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1096 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1097
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001098Extension modules
1099-----------------
1100
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001101- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1102 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1103
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001104- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1105 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1106 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1107 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1108
1109- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1110 collection.
1111
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001112- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1113 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1114 unique within a single program run.
1115
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001116- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1117 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1118
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001119- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1120 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1121
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001122- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1123 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001124
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001125- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1126
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001127- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1128 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1129
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001130- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1131 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1132 for many BSD-derived systems.
1133
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001134
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001135Library
1136-------
1137
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001138- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1139 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1140 primary ones:
1141
1142 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1143 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1144 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1145
1146 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1147 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1148 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1149 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1150 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1151 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1152
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001153- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1154 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1155 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1156 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1157 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1158 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1159 argument.
1160
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001161- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1162 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1163 in the archive.
1164
1165- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1166 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1167
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001168- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1169 569574).
1170
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001171- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1172 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1173 no more.
1174
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001175- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1176 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1177 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1178 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1179 code coverage.
1180
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001181- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1182 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1183 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001184 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1185 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001186
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001187- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1188 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1189 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001190 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001191
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001192- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1193
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001194- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1195 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1196 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1197 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1198
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001199- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1200 handling.
1201
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001202- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1203 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1204
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001205- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1206 in socket.py.
1207
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001208- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1209
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001210- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1211 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1212 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1213 opener with proxy support.
1214
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001215- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1216
1217- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1218
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001219Tools/Demos
1220-----------
1221
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001222- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1223
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001224- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1225
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001226- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1227 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001228
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001229- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1230 files.
1231
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001232Build
1233-----
1234
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001235- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001236 different root directory.
1237
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001238C API
1239-----
1240
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001241- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1242 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1243 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1244 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1245 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1246 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1247 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1248 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1249 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1250 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1251
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001252- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1253 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1254 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1255 from Python.
1256
1257
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001258New platforms
1259-------------
1260
1261None this time.
1262
1263Tests
1264-----
1265
1266- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1267 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1268
1269Windows
1270-------
1271
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001272- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1273
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001274- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1275 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1276 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1277 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1278 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1279 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1280 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1281 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1282 that's what it's for.
1283
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001284Mac
1285---
1286
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001287- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1288 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1289 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1290 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001291- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1292 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1293- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001294
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001295SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1296------------------------------------
1297
1298430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1299598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1300622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1301661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1302683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1303697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1304713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1305724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1306727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1307729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1308730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1309731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1310732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1311733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1312735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1313740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1314744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1315745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1316747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1317749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1318751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1319753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1320755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1321757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1322760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1323
1324
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001325What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1326================================
1327
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001328*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001329
1330Core and builtins
1331-----------------
1332
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001333- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1334 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1335
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001336- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1337 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1338 and cannot be strings).
1339
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001340- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1341 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1342 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1343 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1344
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001345- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1346 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1347 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1348 Python itself.
1349
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001350- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1351 the referenced object, if it has one.
1352
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001353- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1354 the thread started at
1355 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1356
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001357- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1358 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1359 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1360 placed on a list index.
1361
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001362- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1363 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1364 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1365 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1366
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001367- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1368 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1369 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1370 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1371 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1372 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1373 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1374
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001375- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1376 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1377 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1378 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1379 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1380
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001381- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1382 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001383
1384- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1385 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1386 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1387 #693195.)
1388
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001389- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1390 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001391
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001392- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001393 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001394 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1395 interpreter executions, would fail.
1396
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001397- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001398 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001399 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001400
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001401Extension modules
1402-----------------
1403
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001404- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1405 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1406 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1407 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1408
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001409- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1410 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1411
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001412- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1413 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1414 and Greg Chapman.)
1415
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001416- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1417 recursively.
1418
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001419- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001420 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1421 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1422 leaks.
1423
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001424- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1425
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001426- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1427 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1428 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1429 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1430 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1431 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1432 #705836.
1433
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001434- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001435 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1436
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001437- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1438 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1439 See SF bug #692416.
1440
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001441- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1442 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1443
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001444- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1445 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1446 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001447
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001448- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001449 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1450 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1451
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001452- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1453 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1454 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1455 timeouts to work properly.
1456
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001457Library
1458-------
1459
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001460- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1461 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1462 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1463 future release.
1464
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001465- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1466 for querying platform dependent features.
1467
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001468- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001469
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001470- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1471 pickle protocol versions.
1472
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001473- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1474 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1475 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1476
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001477- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1478
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001479- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1480 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1481 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1482 modules.
1483
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001484- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1485 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1486 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1487
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001488- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1489 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1490
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001491- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1492 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1493 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1494
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001495- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001496 MS Office extensions.
1497
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001498- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1499 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1500
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001501- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1502 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1503
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001504- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1505 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1506 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1507 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1508 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1509 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1510
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001511- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1512 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1513 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001514
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001515- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1516 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1517 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1518
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001519- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1520
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001521- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1522 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1523 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1524
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001525Tools/Demos
1526-----------
1527
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001528- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1529 See the module docstring for details.
1530
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001531Build
1532-----
1533
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001534- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1535 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001536
1537C API
1538-----
1539
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001540- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1541
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001542- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1543 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1544 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1545
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001546- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1547 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001548
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001549 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1550 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1551 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001552
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001553- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001554 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1555
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001556- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1557 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1558 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001559
1560New platforms
1561-------------
1562
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001563None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001564
1565Tests
1566-----
1567
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001568- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1569 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001570
1571Windows
1572-------
1573
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001574- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1575 function.
1576
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001577- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1578 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001579
1580Mac
1581---
1582
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001583- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1584 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001585
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001586- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1587 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001588
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001589- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1590 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1591 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001592
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001593- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001594 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1595 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001596
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001597- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1598 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001599
1600
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001601What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1602=================================
1603
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001604*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001605
1606Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001607-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001608
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001609- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1610 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1611 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1612
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001613- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1614 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1615 (SF patch #664376.)
1616
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001617- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1618 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1619 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1620 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1621 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1622 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001623 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001624
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001625- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1626 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1627 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1628 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001629 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001630
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001631- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1632 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1633 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1634 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1635 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1636 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1637 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1638 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1639 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1640 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1641 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1642
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001643- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1644 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1645 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1646 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1647 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1648 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1649
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001650- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1651 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1652
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001653- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1654 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1655 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1656 case.)
1657
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001658- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1659 passed as unicode strings.
1660
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001661- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1662 See SF bug #683467.
1663
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001664- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1665 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1666
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001667- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1668
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001669- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1670
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001671- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1672 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1673 arguments.
1674
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001675- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1676 See SF bug #667147.
1677
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001678- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001679 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001680 See SF bug #676155.
1681
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001682- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001683 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001684 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1685 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1686 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1687 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1688 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1689 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001690
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001691Extension modules
1692-----------------
1693
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001694- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1695 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1696 tp_as_number pointer.
1697
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001698- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1699 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1700 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1701 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1702 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1703
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001704- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1705
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001706- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1707
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001708- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001709 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001710 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1711 patch #678531.)
1712
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001713- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1714 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1715
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001716- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1717 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1718
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001719- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1720
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001721- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1722 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1723 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1724
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001725- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1726
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001727- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1728 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1729
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001730- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001731
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001732- datetime changes:
1733
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001734 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1735
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001736 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1737 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1738 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1739 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1740 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1741 now.
1742
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001743 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001744 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1745 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001746
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001747 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001748 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001749 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1750 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1751 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1752 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001753
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001754 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1755 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1756 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001757 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1758
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001759 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1760 by a later example coded by Guido.
1761
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001762 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001763 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1764 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1765 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001766 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1767 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1768
1769 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1770 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1771 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1772 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1773 tzinfo subclass instance.
1774
1775 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1776 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1777 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1778 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1779 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1780 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1781 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1782 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001783
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001784 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1785 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1786 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1787 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1788 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001789 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1790
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001791 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001792
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001793 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1794 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1795 as a naive datetime object.
1796
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001797 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1798 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1799 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1800
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001801 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1802 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1803 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1804 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1805 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1806 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1807 comparison.
1808
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001809 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1810 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1811 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1812 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001813 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001814
1815 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001816
1817 and ::
1818
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001819 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1820
1821 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1822 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1823 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1824 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1825
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001826 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1827 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1828 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1829 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1830 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1831
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001832 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1833 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001834 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1835 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001836
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001837Library
1838-------
1839
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001840- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1841 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1842
1843- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1844 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1845 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1846 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1847 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1848 See PEP 307 for details.
1849
1850- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1851 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1852
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001853- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1854 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001855 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001856 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1857 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001858 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001859
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001860- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1861 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1862
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001863- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1864 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1865 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1866
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001867- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1868
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001869- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1870 exception.
1871
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001872- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1873 class.
1874
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001875- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1876 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1877 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1878
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001879- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1880 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1881
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001882- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001883 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1884 See SF bug #659228.
1885
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001886- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1887 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1888 See SF patch #651082.
1889
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001890- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001891
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001892- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1893 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1894
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001895- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001896 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001897
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001898- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1899 DOS paths from other platforms.
1900
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001901Tools/Demos
1902-----------
1903
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001904- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1905 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1906 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1907 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1908 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1909 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1910 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1911 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1912 example:
1913
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001914 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1915 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001916
1917 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1918
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001919
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001920Build
1921-----
1922
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001923- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1924 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1925 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001926 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1927
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001928 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1929
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001930- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1931 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1932 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1933 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1934 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1935 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1936 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1937 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1938 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1939
1940- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1941 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1942 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1943 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1944
1945- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1946 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1947
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001948C API
1949-----
1950
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001951- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1952 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001953
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001954- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1955 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1956 tp_as_number pointer.
1957
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001958- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1959 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1960 (SF #681367)
1961
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001962- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1963 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1964 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1965 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001966
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001967Tests
1968-----
1969
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001970- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001971 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1972 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1973 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1974 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1975 pydoc.)
1976
1977- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1978
1979- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001980
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001981Windows
1982-------
1983
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001984- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1985 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1986 time).
1987
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001988- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1989 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1990
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001991- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1992 release without strong cryptography.
1993
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001994- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001995 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001996
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001997- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1998 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1999
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002000Mac
2001---
2002
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002003- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2004 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002005
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002006- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2007 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2008 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002009
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002010- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2011 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002012
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002013- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2014 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2015 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2016 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002017
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002018- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002019 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2020 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2021 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002022
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002023
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002024What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002025=================================
2026
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002027*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002028
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002029Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002030--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002031
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002032- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2033
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002034- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2035 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002036 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002037 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002038 a different meaning than before.
2039
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002040- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002041 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002042 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002043
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002044- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002045 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002046 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002047
2048- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2049 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2050 and deallocation.
2051
2052- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2053 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2054
2055- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2056 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2057 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2058 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2059 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2060
2061- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2062 now detected by the garbage collector.
2063
2064- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2065 [SF bug 519621]
2066
2067- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2068 identifier.
2069
2070- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2071 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2072 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2073 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2074 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2075 [SF bug 563060]
2076
2077- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2078 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2079 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2080 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2081 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2082
2083- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2084 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2085 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2086
2087- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2088
2089- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2090 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2091 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2092 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2093 state of the slots would be lost.)
2094
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002095Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002096-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002097
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002098- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002099 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2100 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2101 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2102 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002103 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2104 Jython 2.1.
2105
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002106- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002107 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002108 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2109 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2110 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2111 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2112 these, see PEP 302.
2113
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002114- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2115 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2116 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2117
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002118- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2119 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2120 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2121
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002122- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2123 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2124 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2125
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002126- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2127 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2128 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2129 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2130 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2131 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2132 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2133 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2134 releases or implementations.
2135
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002136- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002137 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2138 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002139
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002140- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2141 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2142
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002143- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2144 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2145 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2146
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002147- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2148 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2149
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002150- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2151 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002152 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2153 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002154
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002155- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2156 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2157 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2158 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2159 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2160
2161 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2162 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2163 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2164 pattern.
2165
2166 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2167 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2168 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2169 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2170
2171 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2172 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2173 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2174 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2175 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2176 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2177
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002178- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2179 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2180 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2181 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2182 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2183 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2184 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2185 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002186
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002187- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2188 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2189 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2190 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2191 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002192 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2193 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2194 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2195 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2196 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2197 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2198 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002199
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002200- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2201 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2202
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002203- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2204 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2205 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2206 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2207 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2208 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2209 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2210 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2211 to Zack Weinberg!
2212
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002213- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2214 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2215 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2216 type. This has been fixed now.
2217
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002218- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2219 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2220 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2221
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002222- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2223 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2224 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2225 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2226 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2227 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2228 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2229 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002230 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002231
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002232- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2233 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2234 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002235
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002236- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2237 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2238 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2239 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2240 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2241 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2242 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2243 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002244 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002245 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2246 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2247
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002248- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2249 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2250 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2251 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2252 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2253 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2254 this.)
2255
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002256- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2257 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002258 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002259 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002260 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2261 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002262 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2263 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002264
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002265- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2266 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2267 currently running.
2268
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002269- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2270 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2271 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2272 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2273
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002274- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2275 as directory names.
2276
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002277- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2278 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2279
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002280- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2281 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2282
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002283- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002284 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2285 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002286
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002287- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2288 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2289 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2290 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2291 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2292
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002293- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2294 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2295 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2296 removed.
2297
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002298- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2299 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2300 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2301
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002302- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2303 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2304 to __debug__.
2305
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002306- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2307 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2308 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2309
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002310- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2311 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2312 deprecated now.
2313
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002314- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2315 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2316 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002317
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002318- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2319 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2320 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2321 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2322 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002323
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002324- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2325 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2326
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002327- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2328 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2329 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002330 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002331 is backward compatible.
2332
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002333- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2334 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2335 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2336 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2337 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2338
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002339- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2340 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2341 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2342 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2343 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2344 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002345
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002346- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2347 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2348
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002349- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2350 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2351
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002352- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2353 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2354 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2355 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2356 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2357
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002358- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2359 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2360 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2361
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002362- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002363 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2364
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002365- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2366 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2367 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002368
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002369- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2370 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2371
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002372- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2373 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2374 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2375
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002376- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2377
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002378Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002379-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002380
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002381- Added three operators to the operator module:
2382 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2383 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2384 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2385
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002386- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2387
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002388- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2389 archives.
2390
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002391- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2392 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2393 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2394
2395 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2396
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002397- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2398 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2399 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002400 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002401
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002402- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2403 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2404 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2405 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002406 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2407 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2408 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2409 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002410
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002411- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2412 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002413
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002414- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2415
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002416- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2417 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2418
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002419- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2420 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2421 supported.
2422
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002423- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2424
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002425- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2426 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002427
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002428- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2429 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2430
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002431- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2432
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002433- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2434 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2435
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002436- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2437 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2438 functions but callable type objects.
2439
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002440- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002441 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002442 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002443
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002444- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2445 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002446
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002447- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2448 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002449
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002450- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2451 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2452 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2453 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2454
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002455- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2456 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002457
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002458- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2459 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2460 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2461 and __imul__.
2462
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002463- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002464 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2465 is called.
2466
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002467- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2468 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2469 interpreter was compiled.
2470
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002471- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2472 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2473 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002474 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002475 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2476 1, not 2.
2477
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002478- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2479 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2480 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2481 limit.
2482
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002483- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2484 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2485 bug #623464.
2486
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002487- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2488 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2489 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2490 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2491
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002492Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002493-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002494
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002495- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2496
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002497- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2498 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2499 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2500 with Python 2.3a2.
2501
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002502- os.path exposes getctime.
2503
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002504- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002505 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002506 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002507 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002508 unit tests of floating point results.
2509
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002510- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2511 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2512 has been increased.
2513
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002514- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2515 executed.
2516
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002517- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2518 postinstallation script.
2519
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002520- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2521 test the current module.
2522
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002523- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002524 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2525 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2526 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2527 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2528
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002529- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002530 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002531 Ward's Optik package.
2532
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002533- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2534 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2535 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2536 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2537
2538- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2539 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002540 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002541
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002542- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2543 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2544 shelf are binary pickles.
2545
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002546- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2547 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2548
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002549- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2550 modules are iterators now.
2551
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002552- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2553 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2554 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2555 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2556 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2557 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002558
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002559- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2560 with their entity value.
2561
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002562- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2563
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002564- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2565 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002566
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002567- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2568 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002569 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002570
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002571- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2572 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2573 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2574 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2575 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2576 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2577 main():
2578
2579 import locale
2580 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2581
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002582- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2583 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2584
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002585- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2586 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2587 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2588 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2589 to the new standard.
2590
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002591- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2592 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2593 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2594 an extension to the database.
2595
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002596- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2597 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2598 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2599 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002600 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002601
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002602- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002603 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002604
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002605- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2606 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2607 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2608 bounded integers.
2609
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002610- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2611 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2612 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2613 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2614 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2615 in existence.
2616
2617 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2618 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2619 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2620 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2621 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2622 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2623
2624 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2625 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2626 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2627 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2628
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002629- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2630 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2631 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2632
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002633- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2634
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002635- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2636 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2637 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2638 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2639
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002640- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2641 argument.
2642
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002643- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2644 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2645 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2646 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2647 [SF patch 560794].
2648
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002649- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2650 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2651 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002652 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2653 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2654 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002655
2656- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2657 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002658
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002659- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2660 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2661 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2662 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002663
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002664- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2665 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2666 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2667 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2668 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2669
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002670- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002671
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002672- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2673
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002674- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2675 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2676 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2677 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2678 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2679 identical to None.
2680
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002681- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2682 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2683 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2684 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2685 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2686 results now.
2687
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002688- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2689 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2690
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002691- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2692 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2693 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2694 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2695 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2696 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2697 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2698 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2699
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002700- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2701
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002702- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2703 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2704
2705- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2706 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2707 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2708 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2709 and other systems.
2710
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002711- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2712 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2713 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2714 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 +00002715 work well with these.
2716
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002717- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2718
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002719- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002720 connections.
2721
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002722- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2723 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2724 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2725
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002726- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2727 sets
2728
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002729- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2730 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2731 name.
2732
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002733- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2734 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2735 passed in.
2736
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002737- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002738 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002739 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2740 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002741
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002742- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2743
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002744- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2745
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002746- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2747 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2748 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2749
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002750- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2751 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2752 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2753 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002754 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002755
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002756- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002757 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002758 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002759
2760- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2761 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2762 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2763
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002764- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002765 the value of its expression argument.
2766
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002767- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2768 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2769 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2770
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002771- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2772 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2773 skipstone browser was included.
2774
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002775- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2776 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2777
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002778Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002779-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002780
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002781- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2782 names in addition to accepting file names.
2783
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002784- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2785 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2786 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2787 still used and useful.)
2788
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002789- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2790 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2791 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2792 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002793
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002794- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2795 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2796 the generated binary.
2797
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002798Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002799-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002800
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002801- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2802
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002803- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2804 except in the hands of experts.
2805
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002806- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002807 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2808 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2809 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002810
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002811- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2812 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2813 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2814 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2815 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2816 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2817 builds.
2818
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002819- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2820 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2821 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2822 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2823 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2824 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2825 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2826 new type.
2827
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002828- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002829
2830 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2831 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2832 positive infinities.
2833
2834 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2835 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2836 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2837 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2838 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2839 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2840 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2841
2842 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2843
2844 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2845
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002846- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2847 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2848 size of the executable.
2849
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002850- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2851 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2852 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2853 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002854
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002855- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2856
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002857- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2858 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2859 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002860
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002861- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2862 well as Unix.
2863
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002864- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2865 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2866 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2867 modules in the README file for details.
2868
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002869C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002870-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002871
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002872- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2873 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002874 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002875 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002876 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002877
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002878- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2879 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2880 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2881 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2882 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2883 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002884 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002885 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2886 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2887 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2888 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2889 aligned.)
2890
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002891- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2892 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2893 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2894
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002895- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2896 level.
2897
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002898- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2899 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2900 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2901 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2902 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2903
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002904- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2905 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2906 code.
2907
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002908- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2909 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2910 adjusting for negative indices.
2911
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002912- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2913 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2914 object.
2915
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002916- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2917 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2918 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2919
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002920- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2921 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002922
2923- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2924
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002925- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2926 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2927 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2928 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2929
2930- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2931
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002932- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002933
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002934- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002935 without going through the buffer API.
2936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002938
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002939- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2940 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2941 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2942 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2943
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002944- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2945 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2946
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002947- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002948 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2949
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002950New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002952
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002953- OpenVMS is now supported.
2954
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002955- AtheOS is now supported.
2956
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002957- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2958
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002959- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2960
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002961Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002962-----
2963
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002964- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2965 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2966 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002967
2968Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002970
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002971- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2972 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2973 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2974 bugs.
2975 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002976 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002977 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2978 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002979 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002980
2981- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002982 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002983
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002984- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2985 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2986
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002987- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2988 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002989 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002990 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2991
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002992- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2993 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2994 use files" uninstall option).
2995
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002996- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2997
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002998- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2999 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3000
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003001- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3002 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3003 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3004
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003005- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3006 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3007 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3008 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3009 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003010 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3011 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3012 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003013
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003014- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003015 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003016 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3017 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3018 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3019 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3020 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3021 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3022 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3023 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3024 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3025 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3026 work around.
3027
3028- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3029 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3030 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3031 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3032 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3033 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3034 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3035 specified with O_CREAT too).
3036
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003037Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003038----
3039
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003040- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003041
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003042- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3043 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3044 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3045
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003046- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3047 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3048 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3049
3050- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3051 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3052 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3053 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3054 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3055 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3056 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3057 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003058
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003059- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3060 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3061 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003062
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003063- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3064 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3065 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3066 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3067 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003068
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003069- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3070 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3071 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003072
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003073- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3074 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003075
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003076- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3077 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3078 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3079 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3080 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003081
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003082- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3083 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3084 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3085
3086- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3087 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3088 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003089
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003090- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3091 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3092 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3093 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003094 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003095
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003096- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3097 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003098
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003099- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3100 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003101
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003102- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003103 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003104 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3105 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003106
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003107
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003108What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003109===============================
3110
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3112
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003113Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003115
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003116- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3117 with a custom metaclass.
3118
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003119Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003121
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003122- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3123 are proxies.
3124
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003125Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003127
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003128- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3129 very short strings.
3130
3131- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3132 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3133 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3134 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3135 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3136
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003137Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003139
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003140- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3141 close or delete time).
3142
3143- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3144 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3145
3146- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3147
3148- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003149 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003150
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003151Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003152-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003153
3154Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003155-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003156
3157C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003159
3160New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003162
3163Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003165
3166Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003168
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003169- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3170
3171- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3172 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3173
3174- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3175 deleted at process exit time.
3176
3177- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3178 in backslash.
3179
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003180Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003182
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003183- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3184 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3185 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3186
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003187
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003188What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003189===========================
3190
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3192
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003193Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003195
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003196- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3197 been extensively updated. See
3198
3199 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3200
3201 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3202
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003203- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3204 deleted!
3205
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003206- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3207 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3208 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3209 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3210 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3211
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003212- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3213
3214 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3215 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3216
3217 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3218 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3219 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3220 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3221 supported anyway.
3222
3223 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3224 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3225
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003226- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3227 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3228 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3229 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3230 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003231
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003232- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3233 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3234 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3235
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003236Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003238
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003239- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3240 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3241 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3242 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3243 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3244 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003245 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3246 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3247 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3248 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003249
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003250- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3251 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3252 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3253
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003254Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003256
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003257- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3258
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003259Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003260-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003261
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003262- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3263 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3264 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3265 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3266 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3267 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3268
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003269- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3270
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003271- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3272
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003273- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3274
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003275- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3276 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3277 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3278
3279- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3280
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003281Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003283
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003284- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3285 off a search on Google.
3286
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003287Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003289
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003290- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3291 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3292 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3293 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3294 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3295 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3296 other platforms should do likewise.
3297
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003298- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3299 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3300 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3301
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003302C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003304
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003305- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3306 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3307 producing key-value pairs.
3308
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003309- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003310 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003311 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3312 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3313 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3314 previously went unchallenged.
3315
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003316New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003318
3319Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003321
3322Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003324
3325Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003327
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003328- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3329 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003330
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003331- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3332 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3333 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3334 home.
3335
3336
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003337What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003338===========================
3339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3341
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003342Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003344
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003345- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3346 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003347
3348 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003349 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003350
3351 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3352 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003353 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003354 This needs to be documented.
3355
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003356- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3357 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3358
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003359- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3360 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3361 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3362
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003363- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3364 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3365
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003366- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3367 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3368 class forbids it).
3369
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003370- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3371 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3372 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3373
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003374- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3375
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003376Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003377-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003378
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003379- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3380 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003381 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003382
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003383- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3384 (like 1 + '').
3385
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003386Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003387-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003388
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003389- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3390 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3391 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3392 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003393 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003394 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3395
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003396- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3397 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3398 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3399 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3400
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003401- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3402 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003403 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3404 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3405 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003406
3407- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3408 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003409
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003410- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3411 bytes on its input.
3412
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003413Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003415
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003416- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003417 convenience function.
3418
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003419- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3420 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3421 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003422 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3423 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3424 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3425 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3426 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3427 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003428
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003429- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3430 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3431 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3432 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3433
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003434- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3435 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3436 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3437
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003438- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3439 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3440 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3441 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3442
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003443- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3444 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003446 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3447 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3448 new -l and -e options.
3449
3450- statcache is now deprecated.
3451
3452- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3453 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003455 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3456 time properly taken into account.
3457
3458- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3459 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3460 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3461 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3462
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003463Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003464-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003465
3466Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003467-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003468
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003469- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3470 is built with libdb3 if available.
3471
3472- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3473
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003474C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003475-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003476
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003477- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3478 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3479 PySequence_Size().
3480
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003481- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3482
3483- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3484 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3485 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3486
3487- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3488 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3489
3490- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3491 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3492
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003493New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003495
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003496- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3497 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3498
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003499- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3500 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3501
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003502- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3503
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003504Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003506
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003507- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3508 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3509
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003510Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003512
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003513Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003515
3516- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3517 removed completely in the next release.
3518
3519- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3520 OSX.
3521
3522- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3523 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3524
3525- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3526
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003527
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003528What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003529===========================
3530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3532
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003533Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003535
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003536- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003537 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003538 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003539 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3540 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003541 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3542 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003543 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3544 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003545
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003546- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3547 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3548
3549- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3550 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3551
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003552Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003554
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003555- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3556 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3557 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3558 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3559 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3560 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3561 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3562 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3563
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003564- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3565 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3566 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3567 example).
3568
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003569- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003570 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003571 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003572 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003573
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003574- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3575 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3576 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003577 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003578
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003579- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3580 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3581 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3582 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3583 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3584 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3585
3586 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3587
3588 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3589
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003590Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003592
3593- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3594
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003595- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3596
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003597- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3598 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003599
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003600- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3601 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3602 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3603 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3604 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3605 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003606 attributes.
3607
3608- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3609 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3610 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003611
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003612- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3613 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3614 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003615
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003616- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3617 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3618 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003619 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3620 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3621
3622- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3623 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003624
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003625Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003627
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003628- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3629 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3630
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003631- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3632 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3633 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3634 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3635
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003636- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3637 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3638 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3639 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3640
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003641 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3642 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3643 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3644 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3645 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3646 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3647 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3648 without losing information).
3649
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003650- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003651 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3652 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3653 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3654 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3655 module).
3656
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003657 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003658 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3659 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3660 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3661 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003662
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003663- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003664 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3665 encoding.
3666
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003667- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3668 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3669
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003671 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3672
3673- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3674 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3675 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3676 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3677
3678- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3679
3680- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3681 ON, and OFF.
3682
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003683- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3684 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3685
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003686Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003688
3689- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3690 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3691 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003692
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003693- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3694 been added: -X and -E.
3695
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003696Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003698
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003699- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3700 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3701
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003702C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003704
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003705- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3706 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3707 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3708 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3709 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3710
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003711- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3712 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3713 as long) arguments.
3714
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003715- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3716 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3717 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3718 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3719 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3720 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3721
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003722- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3723 input.
3724
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003725New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003727
3728Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003729-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003730
3731Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003733
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003734- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3735 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3736 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3737
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003738- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3739 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3740 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003741 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003742
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3744 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3745 import signal
3746 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003747
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003749 while 1:
3750 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003752 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3753 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3754 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3755 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003756
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003757
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003758What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3759===========================
3760
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3762
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003763Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003764--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003765
3766- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3767 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3768 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3769
3770- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3771 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3772 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3773 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3774 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3775 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3776 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003777
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003778- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003779 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003780 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3781 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3782 associate a docstring with a property.
3783
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003784- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3785 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3786 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3787 other built-in object types.
3788
3789- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3790 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3791 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3792 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3793 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3794
3795- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3796 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3797
3798- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3799 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003800 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003801 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3802 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3803 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3804 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3805 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3806
3807- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3808 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3809 class.
3810
3811- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3812 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3813 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3814 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3815
3816- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3817 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3818 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3819 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3820
3821- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3822 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3823
3824- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3825 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3826 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3827 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3828 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003829 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003830 with the same value as s.
3831
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003832- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3833
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003834Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003836
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003837- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3838
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003839- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3840 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3841 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3842 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3843 objects.
3844
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003845- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3846 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003847 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3848 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3849
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003850- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3851 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3852 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3853
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003854Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003855-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003856
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003857- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3858 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3859 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3860 by the instances.
3861
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003862- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3863 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3864 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3865
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003866- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3867 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3868 before the entire comparison is complete.
3869
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003870- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3871 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3872 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3873
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003874- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3875 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3876 getwriter().
3877
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003878- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3879 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3880
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003881- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003882 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3883 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3884
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003885- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3886 iterable object.
3887
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003888- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3889 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003890
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003891- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3892 authentication.
3893
3894- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3895 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003896
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003897- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003898 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3899 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3900 a sample driver.)
3901
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003902Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003904
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003905- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3906 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3907 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3908 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3909 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3910 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3911 kernel has large file support.
3912
3913- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3914 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3915 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3916 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3917 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3918
3919- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3920 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3921 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3922
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003923C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003925
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003926- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3927 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3928
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003929New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003931
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003932- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3933 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3934
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003935Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003937
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003938- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3939 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3940 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3941 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3942 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3943
3944- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3945 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3946 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3947 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3948
3949- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3950 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3951
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003952Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003954
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003955- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003956 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3957 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003958
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003959
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003960What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3961===========================
3962
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3964
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003965Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003966----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003967
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003968- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3969 big to represent as a C double.
3970
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003971- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3972 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3973 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3974 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3975 restriction).
3976
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003977- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3978 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3979 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3980 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3981 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3982
3983 >>> dir([])
3984 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3985 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3986 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3987 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3988 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3989 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3990 'reverse', 'sort']
3991
3992 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3993
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003994- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003995 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3996 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3997 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3998 OverflowError exception.
3999
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004000- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004001 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004002 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4003 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4004 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4005 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4006 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004007 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4009 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4010
4011 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4012 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4013 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4014 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004015
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004016- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004017 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4018 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4019 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4020 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4021 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4022 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4023 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4024 once it is created.
4025
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004026- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4027 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4028 (key, value) pairs.
4029
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004030- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004031 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4032 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4033
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004034- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4035 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4036 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4037 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4038 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004039
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004040- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004041 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4042 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4043
4044 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4045
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004046- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004047 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4048
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004049Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004050-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004051
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004052- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004053 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4054 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004055
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004056- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4057 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4058 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4059 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4060 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4061 in this area anymore).
4062
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004063- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4064 threading.Timer.
4065
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004066- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4067 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4068
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004069- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004070 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4071
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004072- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004073 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4074 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4075 converted to Python longs.
4076
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004077- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004078 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4079
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004080- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4081 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4082 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4083
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004084Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004086
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004087- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4088 division operators as per PEP 238.
4089
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004090Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004092
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004093- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4094 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4095 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4096 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4097
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004098C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004099-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004100
4101- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004102
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004103- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4104 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004105 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004106
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4108 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004109 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004111
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004112- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004113 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4114 module:
4115
4116 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004117
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004118 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4119 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004120
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004121 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4122 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004123
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004124 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4125
4126 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4127
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004128- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004129 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4130 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4131 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004132
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004133New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004134-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004135
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004136- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4137 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4138 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4139 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4140 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004141
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004142Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004144
4145Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004147
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004148- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4149 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4150 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4151 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004152 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4153 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4154 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4155 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4156 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004157
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004158- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004159 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4160
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004161
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004162What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4163===========================
4164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004165*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4166
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004167Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004169
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004170- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4171 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4172
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004173- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4174 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4175 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004176
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004177- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4178 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4179 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4180 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004181
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004182- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4183
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004185
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004186Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004188
4189- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004190 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004191 the module docstring for details.
4192
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004193Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004195
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004196- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004197 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4198 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4199 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004200
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004201- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4202 Nick Mathewson.
4203
4204Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004205----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004206
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004207- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4208 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4209 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4210 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4211 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4212 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4213 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4214 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4215
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004216- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4217 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4218 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4219 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4220
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004221- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4222 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4223 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4224 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4225 come a long way).
4226
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004227- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4228 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4229 write filters for these warnings).
4230
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004231- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4232 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4233 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4234 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4235 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4236
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004237- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4238 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4239 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4240 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4241 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4242 older distribution.
4243
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004244Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004245-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004246
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004247- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4248 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004249 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004250
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004251- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4252 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4253 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4254
4255- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4256
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004257- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4258
4259- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4260
4261- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004264
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004265- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4266
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004267New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004269
4270C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004272
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004273- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4274 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4275 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4276 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4277 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4278 against buffer overruns.
4279
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004280- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004281 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4282 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004283 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4284 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4285 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4286
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004287- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4288 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4289 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4290 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4291 deprecated.
4292
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004293Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004294-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004295
4296- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4297 relevant is found.
4298
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004299
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004300What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004301===========================
4302
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4304
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004305Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004307
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004308- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4309 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4310 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4311 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4312 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4313 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4314 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4315 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004316 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004317 repaired.
4318
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004319- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004320 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004321 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4322 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4323 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4324 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4325 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4326 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4327 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4328 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4329
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004330- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4331 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4332 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4333 leading BMO character).
4334
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004335- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4336 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4337 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4338
4339 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4340 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4341 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004342
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004343 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4344 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4345 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4346 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4347 for various simple to use conversions.
4348
4349 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4350 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4351
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4353 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4354 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4355 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4356 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4357 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4358 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4359 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4360 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4361 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4362 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4363 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4364 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4365 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4366 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004367
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004368- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4369 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4370 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004371 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004372 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004373
4374 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004375 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4376 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4377 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4378 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4379 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004380 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4381 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004382
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004383 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4384 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4385 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004386 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004387
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004388- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4389 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4390 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4391 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4392 floating arithmetic,
4393
4394 x = 9007199254740992.0
4395 print long(x)
4396
4397 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4398 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4399 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4400 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4401 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4402 functions are of good quality).
4403
4404 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4405 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4406 algorithms to break.
4407
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004408- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4409 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4410 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4411 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4412 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4413 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4414 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4415 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4416 order.
4417
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004418- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4419 operation along the most common code paths.
4420
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004421- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4422 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4423
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004424- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4425 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4426 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4427 {}.update(UserDict())
4428
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004429- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4430 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4431 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4432 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4433 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4434 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4435 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4436 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4437
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004438- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004439 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004441 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004442 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4443 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004444 join() method of strings
4445 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004446 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4447 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004449 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004450
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004451- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4452 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4453
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004454- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4455 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4456
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004457- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4458 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4459 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4460 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4461
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004462- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4463 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004464 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004465 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4466 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004467
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004468- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4469
4470
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004471Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004473
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004474- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004475 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004476 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4477 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4478
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004479- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4480 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4481
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004482- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4483 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4484 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4485 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4486
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004487- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4488 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4489 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4490
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004491- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4492
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004493- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4494
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004495- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4496 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4497 that are still imported into string.py).
4498
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004499- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4500
4501- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4502 Now it does.
4503
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004504- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4505
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004506- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4507 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4508 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4509 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4510 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004511 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4512 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004513
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004514- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4515 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4516 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4517 'help(object)'.
4518
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004519Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004521
4522- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004523 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004524 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4525 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4526
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004527- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004528 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4529 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004530
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004531C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004533
4534- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4535 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536
4537----
4538
4539**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**