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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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000015- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
16 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
17 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
18
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000019- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
20 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
21 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
22 freelist.
23
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000024- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
25 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
26
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000027- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
28 number.
29
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000030- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
31 a TypeError exception.
32
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000033Extension modules
34-----------------
35
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000036- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
37
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000038- readline.clear_history was added.
39
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000040- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
41
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000042- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
43
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +000044- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
45
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +000046- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
47
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +000048- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
49
50- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
51
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000052Library
53-------
54
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +000055- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
56 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
57 list of fieldnames.
58
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +000059- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
60 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
61
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +000062- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
63
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +000064- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
65 empty lists.
66
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +000067- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
68 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
69 and shelves.
70
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +000071- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
72 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
73
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000074- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +000075 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
76 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +000077
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +000078- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
79 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
80 allow any iterable. Also the Set.update() has been deprecated because
81 it duplicates Set.union_update().
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +000082
Raymond Hettinger3081d592003-08-09 18:30:57 +000083- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
84 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
85 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
86
Raymond Hettingerb5a42082003-08-08 05:10:41 +000087- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
88 of raising a TypeError exception.
89
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +000090- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +000091 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
92 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
93
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +000094- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
95 and removed in Py2.4.
96
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000097Tools/Demos
98-----------
99
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000100- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
101 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
102 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
103 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
104
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000105- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
106
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000107- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
108 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
109 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
110 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
111 now.
112
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000113- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
114 in effect
115
116- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
117 C-c C-h
118
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000119- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
120 -d option was given.
121
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000122Build
123-----
124
125C API
126-----
127
128New platforms
129-------------
130
131Tests
132-----
133
134Windows
135-------
136
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000137- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
138 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
139 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
140
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000141Mac
142----
143
144
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000145What's New in Python 2.3 final?
146===============================
147
148*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
149
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000150IDLE
151----
152
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000153- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
154 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
155 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
156 context-menu actions.
157
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000158- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
159 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
160 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
161 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
162 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
163 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
164 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
165 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
166 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
167
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000168
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000169What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
170=============================================
171
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000172*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000173
174Core and builtins
175-----------------
176
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000177- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000178 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000179 comment at the end are still unsupported.
180
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000181Extension modules
182-----------------
183
184- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
185 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
186 than once. This has been fixed.
187
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000188- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
189 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
190 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
191 call.
192
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000193- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
194
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000195Library
196-------
197
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000198- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
199 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
200
201- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
202 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
203 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
204 restored.
205
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000206IDLE
207----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000208
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000209- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000210
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000211Build
212-----
213
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000214- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
215 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
216
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000217C API
218-----
219
220Windows
221-------
222
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000223- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
224 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
225
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000226- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
227
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000228Mac
229---
230
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000231- Various fixes to pimp.
232
233- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
234
235- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
236 more problems than it solves.
237
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000238
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000239What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
240=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000241
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000242*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
243
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000244Core and builtins
245-----------------
246
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000247- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
248 by sys.setcheckinterval().
249
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000250- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
251 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000252 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000253
254- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
255 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
256 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000257 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000258
259- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
260 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000261
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000262- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
263 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
264 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
265
266- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000267 770247.
268
269- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000270
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000271Extension modules
272-----------------
273
274- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
275 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
276
277- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
278
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000279- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
280
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000281- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
282 contained within the _strptime module.
283
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000284- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
285 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
286
287- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000288 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
289
290- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
291 the find_class attribute, if present.
292
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000293- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000294
295 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
296 (SF bug 763298).
297
298 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000299 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
300 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
301 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000302
303 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
304
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000305Library
306-------
307
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000308- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
309
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000310- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
311 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
312 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
313 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
314 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
315 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
316 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
317 or Tester().
318
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000319- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
320 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
321 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
322 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
323 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
324 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
325 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
326 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
327 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000328
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000329 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000330
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000331- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
332 weren't before was an oversight.
333
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000334- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
335 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
336
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000337- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
338 when there are no lines.
339
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000340- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
341 which could occur with Tk 8.4
342
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000343- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
344 to child processes.
345
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000346- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
347
348- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
349
350- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
351 xmlrpclib.
352
353- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
354 responses.
355
356- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
357 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
358
359- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
360 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
361 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
362
363- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
364 used as patterns.
365
366- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
367 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
368 than Tk 8.3.
369
370- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
371
372- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000373
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000374Tools/Demos
375-----------
376
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000377- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
378
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000379- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
380
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000381- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000382
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000383Build
384-----
385
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000386- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
387
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000388- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
389
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000390- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
391 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000392
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000393- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
394 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
395 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000396
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000397C API
398-----
399
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000400- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
401 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
402
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000403Windows
404-------
405
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000406- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
407 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
408 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
409 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
410 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
411 Python exception ::
412
413 thread.error: can't start new thread
414
415 is raised now.
416
417- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
418 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
419 instead of from DLL teardown.
420
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000421Mac
422---
423
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000424- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000425 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000426 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
427 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
428 the executable in the bundle.
429
430- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000431
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000432- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
433
434- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
435 on Panther.
436
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000437What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
438================================
439
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000440*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000441
442Core and builtins
443-----------------
444
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000445- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
446 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
447 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
448 with the -i option.
449
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000450- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
451 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
452
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000453- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
454 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
455
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000456- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
457 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
458 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
459 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
460 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
461 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
462 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
463 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
464 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
465 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
466 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
467 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
468 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000469
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000470- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
471 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
472 embedded in a lambda expression.
473
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000474- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
475 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
476 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
477 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
478 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
479
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000480- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
481 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
482 matches the restriction on classic classes.
483
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000484- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
485 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
486
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000487- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
488 It's writable again.
489
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000490- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
491 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
492 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000493 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000494
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000495- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
496 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
497 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
498
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000499Extension modules
500-----------------
501
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000502- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
503 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
504
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000505- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
506 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
507 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
508 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
509
510- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
511 collection.
512
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000513- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
514 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
515 unique within a single program run.
516
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000517- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
518 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
519
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000520- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
521 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
522
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000523- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
524 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000525
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000526- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
527
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000528- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
529 Fixes SF bug #730685.
530
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000531- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
532 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
533 for many BSD-derived systems.
534
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000535
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000536Library
537-------
538
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000539- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
540 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
541 primary ones:
542
543 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
544 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
545 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
546
547 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
548 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
549 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
550 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
551 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
552 framework features (which doctest lacks).
553
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000554- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
555 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
556 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
557 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
558 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
559 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
560 argument.
561
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000562- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
563 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
564 in the archive.
565
566- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
567 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
568
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000569- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
570 569574).
571
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000572- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
573 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
574 no more.
575
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000576- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
577 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
578 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
579 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
580 code coverage.
581
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000582- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
583 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
584 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000585 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
586 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000587
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000588- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
589 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
590 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000591 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000592
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000593- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
594
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000595- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
596 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
597 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
598 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
599
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000600- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
601 handling.
602
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000603- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
604 __doc__ of data descriptors.
605
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000606- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
607 in socket.py.
608
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000609- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
610
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000611- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
612 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
613 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
614 opener with proxy support.
615
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000616- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
617
618- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
619
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000620Tools/Demos
621-----------
622
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000623- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
624
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000625- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
626
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000627- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
628 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000629
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000630- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
631 files.
632
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000633Build
634-----
635
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000636- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000637 different root directory.
638
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000639C API
640-----
641
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000642- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
643 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
644 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
645 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
646 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
647 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
648 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
649 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
650 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
651 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
652
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000653- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
654 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
655 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
656 from Python.
657
658
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000659New platforms
660-------------
661
662None this time.
663
664Tests
665-----
666
667- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
668 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
669
670Windows
671-------
672
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000673- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
674
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000675- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
676 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
677 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
678 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
679 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
680 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
681 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
682 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
683 that's what it's for.
684
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000685Mac
686---
687
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000688- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
689 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
690 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
691 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000692- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
693 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
694- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000695
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000696SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
697------------------------------------
698
699430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
700598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
701622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
702661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
703683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
704697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
705713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
706724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
707727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
708729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
709730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
710731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
711732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
712733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
713735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
714740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
715744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
716745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
717747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
718749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
719751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
720753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
721755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
722757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
723760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
724
725
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000726What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
727================================
728
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000729*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000730
731Core and builtins
732-----------------
733
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000734- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
735 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
736
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000737- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
738 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
739 and cannot be strings).
740
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000741- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
742 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
743 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
744 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
745
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000746- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
747 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
748 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
749 Python itself.
750
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000751- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
752 the referenced object, if it has one.
753
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000754- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
755 the thread started at
756 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
757
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000758- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
759 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
760 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
761 placed on a list index.
762
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000763- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
764 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
765 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
766 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
767
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000768- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
769 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
770 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
771 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
772 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
773 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
774 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
775
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000776- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
777 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
778 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
779 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
780 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
781
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000782- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
783 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000784
785- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
786 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
787 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
788 #693195.)
789
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000790- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
791 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000792
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000793- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000794 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000795 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
796 interpreter executions, would fail.
797
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000798- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000799 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000800 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000801
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000802Extension modules
803-----------------
804
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000805- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
806 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
807 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
808 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
809
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000810- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
811 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
812
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000813- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
814 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
815 and Greg Chapman.)
816
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000817- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
818 recursively.
819
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000820- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000821 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
822 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
823 leaks.
824
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000825- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
826
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000827- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
828 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
829 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
830 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
831 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
832 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
833 #705836.
834
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000835- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000836 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
837
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000838- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
839 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
840 See SF bug #692416.
841
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000842- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
843 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
844
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000845- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
846 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
847 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000848
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000849- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000850 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
851 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
852
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000853- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
854 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
855 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
856 timeouts to work properly.
857
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000858Library
859-------
860
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000861- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
862 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
863 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
864 future release.
865
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000866- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
867 for querying platform dependent features.
868
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000869- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000870
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000871- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
872 pickle protocol versions.
873
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000874- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
875 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
876 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
877
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000878- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
879
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000880- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
881 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
882 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
883 modules.
884
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000885- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
886 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
887 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
888
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000889- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
890 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
891
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000892- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
893 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
894 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
895
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000896- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000897 MS Office extensions.
898
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000899- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
900 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
901
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000902- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
903 execution speed of expressions and statements.
904
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000905- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
906 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
907 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
908 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
909 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
910 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
911
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000912- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
913 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
914 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000915
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000916- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
917 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
918 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
919
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000920- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
921
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000922- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
923 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
924 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
925
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000926Tools/Demos
927-----------
928
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000929- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
930 See the module docstring for details.
931
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000932Build
933-----
934
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000935- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
936 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000937
938C API
939-----
940
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000941- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
942
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000943- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
944 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
945 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
946
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000947- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
948 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000949
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000950 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
951 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
952 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000953
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000954- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000955 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
956
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000957- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
958 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
959 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000960
961New platforms
962-------------
963
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000964None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000965
966Tests
967-----
968
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000969- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
970 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000971
972Windows
973-------
974
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000975- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
976 function.
977
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000978- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
979 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000980
981Mac
982---
983
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000984- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
985 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000986
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000987- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
988 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000989
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000990- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
991 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
992 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000993
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000994- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000995 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
996 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000997
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000998- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
999 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001000
1001
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001002What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1003=================================
1004
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001005*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001006
1007Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001008-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001009
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001010- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1011 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1012 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1013
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001014- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1015 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1016 (SF patch #664376.)
1017
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001018- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1019 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1020 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1021 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1022 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1023 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001024 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001025
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001026- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1027 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1028 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1029 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001030 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001031
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001032- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1033 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1034 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1035 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1036 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1037 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1038 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1039 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1040 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1041 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1042 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1043
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001044- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1045 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1046 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1047 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1048 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1049 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1050
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001051- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1052 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1053
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001054- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1055 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1056 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1057 case.)
1058
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001059- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1060 passed as unicode strings.
1061
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001062- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1063 See SF bug #683467.
1064
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001065- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1066 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1067
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001068- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1069
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001070- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1071
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001072- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1073 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1074 arguments.
1075
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001076- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1077 See SF bug #667147.
1078
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001079- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001080 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001081 See SF bug #676155.
1082
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001083- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001084 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001085 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1086 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1087 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1088 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1089 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1090 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001091
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001092Extension modules
1093-----------------
1094
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001095- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1096 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1097 tp_as_number pointer.
1098
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001099- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1100 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1101 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1102 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1103 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1104
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001105- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1106
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001107- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1108
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001109- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001110 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001111 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1112 patch #678531.)
1113
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001114- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1115 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1116
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001117- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1118 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1119
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001120- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1121
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001122- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1123 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1124 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1125
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001126- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1127
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001128- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1129 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1130
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001131- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001132
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001133- datetime changes:
1134
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001135 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1136
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001137 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1138 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1139 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1140 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1141 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1142 now.
1143
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001144 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001145 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1146 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001147
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001148 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001149 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001150 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1151 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1152 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1153 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001154
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001155 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1156 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1157 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001158 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1159
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001160 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1161 by a later example coded by Guido.
1162
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001163 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001164 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1165 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1166 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001167 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1168 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1169
1170 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1171 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1172 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1173 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1174 tzinfo subclass instance.
1175
1176 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1177 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1178 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1179 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1180 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1181 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1182 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1183 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001184
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001185 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1186 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1187 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1188 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1189 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001190 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1191
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001192 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001193
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001194 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1195 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1196 as a naive datetime object.
1197
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001198 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1199 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1200 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1201
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001202 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1203 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1204 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1205 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1206 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1207 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1208 comparison.
1209
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001210 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1211 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1212 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1213 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001214 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001215
1216 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001217
1218 and ::
1219
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001220 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1221
1222 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1223 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1224 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1225 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1226
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001227 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1228 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1229 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1230 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1231 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1232
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001233 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1234 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001235 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1236 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001237
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001238Library
1239-------
1240
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001241- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1242 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1243
1244- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1245 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1246 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1247 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1248 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1249 See PEP 307 for details.
1250
1251- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1252 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1253
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001254- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1255 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001256 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001257 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1258 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001259 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001260
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001261- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1262 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1263
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001264- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1265 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1266 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1267
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001268- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1269
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001270- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1271 exception.
1272
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001273- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1274 class.
1275
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001276- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1277 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1278 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1279
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001280- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1281 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1282
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001283- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001284 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1285 See SF bug #659228.
1286
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001287- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1288 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1289 See SF patch #651082.
1290
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001291- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001292
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001293- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1294 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1295
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001296- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001297 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001298
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001299- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1300 DOS paths from other platforms.
1301
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001302Tools/Demos
1303-----------
1304
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001305- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1306 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1307 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1308 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1309 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1310 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1311 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1312 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1313 example:
1314
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001315 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1316 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001317
1318 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1319
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001320
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001321Build
1322-----
1323
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001324- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1325 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1326 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001327 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1328
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001329 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1330
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001331- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1332 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1333 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1334 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1335 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1336 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1337 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1338 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1339 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1340
1341- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1342 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1343 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1344 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1345
1346- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1347 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1348
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001349C API
1350-----
1351
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001352- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1353 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001354
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001355- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1356 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1357 tp_as_number pointer.
1358
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001359- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1360 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1361 (SF #681367)
1362
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001363- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1364 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1365 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1366 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001367
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001368Tests
1369-----
1370
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001371- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001372 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1373 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1374 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1375 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1376 pydoc.)
1377
1378- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1379
1380- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001381
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001382Windows
1383-------
1384
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001385- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1386 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1387 time).
1388
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001389- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1390 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1391
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001392- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1393 release without strong cryptography.
1394
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001395- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001396 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001397
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001398- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1399 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1400
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001401Mac
1402---
1403
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001404- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1405 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001406
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001407- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1408 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1409 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001410
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001411- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1412 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001413
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001414- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1415 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1416 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1417 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001418
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001419- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001420 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1421 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1422 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001423
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001424
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001425What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001426=================================
1427
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001428*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001429
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001430Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001431--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001432
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001433- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1434
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001435- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1436 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001437 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001438 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001439 a different meaning than before.
1440
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001441- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001442 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001443 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001444
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001445- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001446 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001447 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001448
1449- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1450 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1451 and deallocation.
1452
1453- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1454 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1455
1456- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1457 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1458 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1459 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1460 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1461
1462- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1463 now detected by the garbage collector.
1464
1465- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1466 [SF bug 519621]
1467
1468- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1469 identifier.
1470
1471- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1472 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1473 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1474 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1475 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1476 [SF bug 563060]
1477
1478- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1479 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1480 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1481 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1482 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1483
1484- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1485 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1486 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1487
1488- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1489
1490- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1491 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1492 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1493 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1494 state of the slots would be lost.)
1495
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001496Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001497-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001498
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001499- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001500 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1501 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1502 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1503 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001504 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1505 Jython 2.1.
1506
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001507- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001508 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001509 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1510 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1511 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1512 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1513 these, see PEP 302.
1514
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001515- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1516 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1517 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1518
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001519- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1520 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1521 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1522
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001523- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1524 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1525 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1526
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001527- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1528 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1529 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1530 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1531 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1532 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1533 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1534 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1535 releases or implementations.
1536
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001537- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001538 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1539 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001540
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001541- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1542 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1543
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001544- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1545 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1546 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1547
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001548- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1549 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1550
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001551- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1552 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001553 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1554 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001555
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001556- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1557 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1558 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1559 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1560 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1561
1562 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1563 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1564 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1565 pattern.
1566
1567 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1568 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1569 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1570 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1571
1572 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1573 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1574 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1575 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1576 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1577 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1578
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001579- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1580 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1581 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1582 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1583 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1584 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1585 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1586 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001587
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001588- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1589 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1590 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1591 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1592 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001593 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1594 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1595 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1596 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1597 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1598 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1599 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001600
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001601- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1602 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1603
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001604- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1605 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1606 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1607 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1608 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1609 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1610 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1611 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1612 to Zack Weinberg!
1613
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001614- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1615 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1616 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1617 type. This has been fixed now.
1618
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001619- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1620 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1621 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1622
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001623- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1624 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1625 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1626 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1627 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1628 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1629 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1630 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001631 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001632
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001633- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1634 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1635 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001636
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001637- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1638 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1639 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1640 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1641 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1642 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1643 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1644 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001645 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001646 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1647 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1648
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001649- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1650 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1651 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1652 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1653 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1654 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1655 this.)
1656
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001657- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1658 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001659 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001660 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001661 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1662 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001663 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1664 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001665
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001666- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1667 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1668 currently running.
1669
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001670- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1671 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1672 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1673 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1674
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001675- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1676 as directory names.
1677
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001678- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1679 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1680
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001681- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1682 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1683
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001684- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001685 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1686 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001687
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001688- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1689 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1690 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1691 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1692 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1693
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001694- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1695 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1696 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1697 removed.
1698
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001699- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1700 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1701 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1702
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001703- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1704 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1705 to __debug__.
1706
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001707- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1708 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1709 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1710
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001711- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1712 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1713 deprecated now.
1714
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001715- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1716 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1717 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001718
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001719- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1720 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1721 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1722 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1723 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001724
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001725- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1726 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1727
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001728- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1729 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1730 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001731 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001732 is backward compatible.
1733
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001734- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1735 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1736 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1737 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1738 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1739
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001740- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1741 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1742 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1743 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1744 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1745 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001746
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001747- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1748 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1749
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001750- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1751 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1752
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001753- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1754 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1755 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1756 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1757 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1758
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001759- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1760 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1761 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1762
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001763- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001764 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1765
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001766- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1767 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1768 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001769
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001770- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1771 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1772
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001773- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1774 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1775 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1776
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001777- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1778
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001779Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001780-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001781
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001782- Added three operators to the operator module:
1783 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1784 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1785 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1786
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001787- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1788
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001789- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1790 archives.
1791
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001792- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1793 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1794 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1795
1796 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1797
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001798- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1799 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1800 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001801 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001802
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001803- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1804 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1805 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1806 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001807 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1808 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1809 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1810 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001811
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001812- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1813 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001814
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001815- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1816
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001817- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1818 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1819
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001820- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1821 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1822 supported.
1823
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001824- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1825
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001826- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1827 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001828
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001829- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1830 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1831
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001832- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1833
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001834- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1835 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1836
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001837- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1838 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1839 functions but callable type objects.
1840
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001841- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001842 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001843 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001844
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001845- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1846 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001847
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001848- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1849 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001850
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001851- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1852 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1853 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1854 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1855
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001856- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1857 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001858
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001859- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1860 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1861 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1862 and __imul__.
1863
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001864- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001865 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1866 is called.
1867
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001868- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1869 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1870 interpreter was compiled.
1871
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001872- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1873 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1874 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001875 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001876 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1877 1, not 2.
1878
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001879- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1880 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1881 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1882 limit.
1883
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001884- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1885 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1886 bug #623464.
1887
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001888- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1889 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1890 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1891 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1892
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001894-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001895
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001896- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1897
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001898- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1899 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1900 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1901 with Python 2.3a2.
1902
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001903- os.path exposes getctime.
1904
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001905- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001906 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001907 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001908 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001909 unit tests of floating point results.
1910
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001911- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1912 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1913 has been increased.
1914
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001915- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1916 executed.
1917
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001918- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1919 postinstallation script.
1920
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001921- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1922 test the current module.
1923
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001924- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001925 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1926 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1927 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1928 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1929
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001930- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001931 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001932 Ward's Optik package.
1933
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001934- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1935 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1936 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1937 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1938
1939- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1940 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001941 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001942
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001943- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1944 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1945 shelf are binary pickles.
1946
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001947- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1948 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1949
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001950- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1951 modules are iterators now.
1952
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001953- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1954 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1955 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1956 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1957 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1958 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001959
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001960- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1961 with their entity value.
1962
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001963- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1964
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001965- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1966 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001967
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001968- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1969 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001970 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001971
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001972- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1973 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1974 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1975 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1976 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1977 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1978 main():
1979
1980 import locale
1981 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1982
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001983- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1984 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1985
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001986- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1987 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1988 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1989 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1990 to the new standard.
1991
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001992- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1993 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1994 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1995 an extension to the database.
1996
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001997- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1998 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1999 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2000 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002001 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002002
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002003- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002004 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002005
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002006- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2007 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2008 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2009 bounded integers.
2010
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002011- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2012 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2013 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2014 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2015 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2016 in existence.
2017
2018 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2019 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2020 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2021 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2022 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2023 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2024
2025 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2026 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2027 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2028 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2029
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002030- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2031 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2032 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2033
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002034- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2035
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002036- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2037 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2038 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2039 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2040
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002041- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2042 argument.
2043
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002044- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2045 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2046 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2047 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2048 [SF patch 560794].
2049
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002050- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2051 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2052 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002053 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2054 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2055 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002056
2057- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2058 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002059
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002060- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2061 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2062 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2063 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002064
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002065- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2066 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2067 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2068 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2069 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2070
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002071- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002072
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002073- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2074
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002075- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2076 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2077 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2078 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2079 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2080 identical to None.
2081
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002082- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2083 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2084 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2085 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2086 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2087 results now.
2088
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002089- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2090 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2091
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002092- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2093 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2094 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2095 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2096 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2097 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2098 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2099 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2100
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002101- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2102
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002103- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2104 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2105
2106- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2107 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2108 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2109 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2110 and other systems.
2111
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002112- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2113 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2114 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2115 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 +00002116 work well with these.
2117
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002118- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2119
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002120- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002121 connections.
2122
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002123- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2124 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2125 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2126
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002127- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2128 sets
2129
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002130- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2131 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2132 name.
2133
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002134- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2135 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2136 passed in.
2137
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002138- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002139 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002140 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2141 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002142
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002143- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2144
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002145- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2146
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002147- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2148 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2149 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2150
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002151- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2152 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2153 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2154 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002155 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002156
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002157- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002158 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002159 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002160
2161- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2162 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2163 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2164
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002165- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002166 the value of its expression argument.
2167
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002168- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2169 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2170 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2171
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002172- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2173 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2174 skipstone browser was included.
2175
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002176- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2177 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2178
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002179Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002180-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002181
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002182- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2183 names in addition to accepting file names.
2184
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002185- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2186 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2187 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2188 still used and useful.)
2189
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002190- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2191 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2192 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2193 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002194
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002195- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2196 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2197 the generated binary.
2198
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002199Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002200-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002201
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002202- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2203
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002204- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2205 except in the hands of experts.
2206
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002207- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002208 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2209 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2210 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002211
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002212- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2213 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2214 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2215 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2216 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2217 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2218 builds.
2219
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002220- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2221 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2222 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2223 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2224 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2225 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2226 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2227 new type.
2228
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002229- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002230
2231 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2232 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2233 positive infinities.
2234
2235 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2236 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2237 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2238 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2239 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2240 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2241 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2242
2243 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2244
2245 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2246
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002247- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2248 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2249 size of the executable.
2250
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002251- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2252 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2253 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2254 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002255
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002256- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2257
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002258- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2259 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2260 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002261
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002262- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2263 well as Unix.
2264
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002265- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2266 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2267 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2268 modules in the README file for details.
2269
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002270C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002271-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002272
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002273- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2274 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002275 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002276 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002277 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002278
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002279- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2280 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2281 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2282 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2283 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2284 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002285 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002286 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2287 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2288 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2289 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2290 aligned.)
2291
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002292- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2293 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2294 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2295
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002296- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2297 level.
2298
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002299- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2300 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2301 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2302 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2303 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2304
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002305- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2306 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2307 code.
2308
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002309- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2310 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2311 adjusting for negative indices.
2312
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002313- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2314 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2315 object.
2316
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002317- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2318 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2319 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2320
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002321- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2322 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002323
2324- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2325
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002326- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2327 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2328 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2329 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2330
2331- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2332
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002333- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002334
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002335- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002336 without going through the buffer API.
2337
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002338- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002339
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002340- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2341 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2342 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2343 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2344
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002345- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2346 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2347
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002348- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002349 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2350
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002351New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002352-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002353
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002354- OpenVMS is now supported.
2355
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002356- AtheOS is now supported.
2357
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002358- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2359
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002360- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2361
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002362Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002363-----
2364
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002365- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2366 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2367 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002368
2369Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002370-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002371
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002372- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2373 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2374 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2375 bugs.
2376 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002377 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002378 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2379 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002380 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002381
2382- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002383 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002384
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002385- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2386 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2387
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002388- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2389 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002390 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002391 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2392
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002393- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2394 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2395 use files" uninstall option).
2396
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002397- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2398
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002399- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2400 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2401
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002402- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2403 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2404 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2405
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002406- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2407 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2408 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2409 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2410 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002411 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2412 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2413 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002414
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002415- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002416 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002417 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2418 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2419 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2420 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2421 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2422 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2423 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2424 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2425 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2426 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2427 work around.
2428
2429- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2430 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2431 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2432 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2433 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2434 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2435 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2436 specified with O_CREAT too).
2437
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002438Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002439----
2440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002441- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002442
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002443- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2444 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2445 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002447- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2448 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2449 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2450
2451- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2452 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2453 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2454 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2455 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2456 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2457 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2458 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002459
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002460- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2461 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2462 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002463
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002464- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2465 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2466 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2467 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2468 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002470- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2471 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2472 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002473
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002474- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2475 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002476
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002477- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2478 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2479 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2480 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2481 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002482
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002483- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2484 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2485 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2486
2487- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2488 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2489 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002490
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002491- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2492 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2493 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2494 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002495 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002496
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002497- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2498 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002499
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002500- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2501 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002502
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002503- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002504 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002505 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2506 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002507
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002508
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002509What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002510===============================
2511
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002512*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2513
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002514Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002515--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002516
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002517- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2518 with a custom metaclass.
2519
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002520Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002521-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002522
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002523- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2524 are proxies.
2525
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002526Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002527-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002528
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002529- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2530 very short strings.
2531
2532- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2533 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2534 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2535 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2536 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2537
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002538Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002539-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002540
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002541- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2542 close or delete time).
2543
2544- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2545 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2546
2547- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2548
2549- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002550 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002551
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002552Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002553-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002554
2555Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002556-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002557
2558C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002559-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002560
2561New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002562-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002563
2564Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002565-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002566
2567Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002568-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002569
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002570- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2571
2572- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2573 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2574
2575- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2576 deleted at process exit time.
2577
2578- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2579 in backslash.
2580
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002581Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002582----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002583
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002584- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2585 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2586 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2587
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002588
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002589What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002590===========================
2591
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002592*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2593
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002594Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002595--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002596
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002597- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2598 been extensively updated. See
2599
2600 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2601
2602 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2603
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002604- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2605 deleted!
2606
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002607- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2608 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2609 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2610 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2611 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2612
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002613- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2614
2615 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2616 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2617
2618 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2619 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2620 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2621 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2622 supported anyway.
2623
2624 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2625 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2626
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002627- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2628 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2629 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2630 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2631 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002632
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002633- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2634 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2635 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2636
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002637Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002638-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002639
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002640- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2641 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2642 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2643 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2644 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2645 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002646 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2647 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2648 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2649 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002650
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002651- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2652 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2653 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2654
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002655Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002656-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002657
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002658- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2659
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002660Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002662
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002663- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2664 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2665 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2666 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2667 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2668 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2669
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002670- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2671
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002672- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2673
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002674- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2675
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002676- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2677 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2678 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2679
2680- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2681
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002682Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002683-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002684
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002685- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2686 off a search on Google.
2687
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002688Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002689-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002690
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002691- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2692 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2693 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2694 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2695 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2696 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2697 other platforms should do likewise.
2698
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002699- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2700 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2701 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2702
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002703C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002704-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002705
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002706- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2707 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2708 producing key-value pairs.
2709
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002710- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002711 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002712 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2713 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2714 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2715 previously went unchallenged.
2716
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002717New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002718-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002719
2720Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002722
2723Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002725
2726Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002727----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002728
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002729- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2730 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002731
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002732- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2733 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2734 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2735 home.
2736
2737
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002738What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002739===========================
2740
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002743Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002744--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002745
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002746- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2747 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002748
2749 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002750 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002751
2752 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2753 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002754 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002755 This needs to be documented.
2756
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002757- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2758 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2759
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002760- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2761 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2762 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2763
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002764- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2765 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2766
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002767- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2768 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2769 class forbids it).
2770
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002771- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2772 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2773 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2774
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002775- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2776
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002777Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002778-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002779
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002780- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2781 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002782 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002783
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002784- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2785 (like 1 + '').
2786
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002787Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002788-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002789
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002790- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2791 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2792 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2793 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002794 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002795 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2796
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002797- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2798 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2799 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2800 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2801
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002802- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2803 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002804 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2805 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2806 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002807
2808- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2809 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002810
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002811- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2812 bytes on its input.
2813
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002814Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002815-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002816
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002817- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002818 convenience function.
2819
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002820- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2821 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2822 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002823 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2824 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2825 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2826 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2827 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2828 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002829
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002830- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2831 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2832 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2833 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2834
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002835- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2836 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2837 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2838
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002839- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2840 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2841 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2842 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2843
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002844- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2845 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002846 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002847 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2848 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2849 new -l and -e options.
2850
2851- statcache is now deprecated.
2852
2853- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2854 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002856 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2857 time properly taken into account.
2858
2859- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2860 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2861 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2862 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2863
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002864Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002865-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002866
2867Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002868-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002869
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002870- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2871 is built with libdb3 if available.
2872
2873- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2874
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002875C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002877
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002878- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2879 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2880 PySequence_Size().
2881
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002882- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2883
2884- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2885 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2886 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2887
2888- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2889 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2890
2891- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2892 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2893
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002894New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002895-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002896
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002897- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2898 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2899
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002900- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2901 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2902
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002903- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2904
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002905Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002906-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002907
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002908- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2909 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2910
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002911Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002912-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002913
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002914Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002915----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002916
2917- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2918 removed completely in the next release.
2919
2920- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2921 OSX.
2922
2923- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2924 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2925
2926- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2927
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002928
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002929What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002930===========================
2931
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002932*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2933
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002934Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002935--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002936
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002937- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002938 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002939 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002940 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2941 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002942 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2943 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002944 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2945 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002946
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002947- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2948 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2949
2950- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2951 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2952
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002953Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002955
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002956- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2957 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2958 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2959 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2960 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2961 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2962 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2963 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2964
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002965- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2966 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2967 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2968 example).
2969
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002970- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002971 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002972 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002973 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002974
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002975- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2976 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2977 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002978 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002979
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002980- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2981 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2982 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2983 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2984 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2985 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2986
2987 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2988
2989 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2990
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002991Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002993
2994- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2995
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002996- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2997
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002998- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2999 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003000
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003001- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3002 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3003 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3004 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3005 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3006 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003007 attributes.
3008
3009- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3010 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3011 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003012
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003013- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3014 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3015 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003016
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003017- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3018 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3019 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003020 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3021 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3022
3023- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3024 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003025
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003026Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003028
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003029- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3030 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3031
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003032- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3033 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3034 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3035 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3036
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003037- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3038 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3039 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3040 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3041
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003042 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3043 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3044 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3045 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3046 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3047 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3048 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3049 without losing information).
3050
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003051- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003052 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3053 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3054 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3055 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3056 module).
3057
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003058 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003059 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3060 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3061 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3062 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003063
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003064- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003065 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3066 encoding.
3067
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003068- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3069 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003072 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3073
3074- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3075 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3076 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3077 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3078
3079- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3080
3081- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3082 ON, and OFF.
3083
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003084- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3085 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3086
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003087Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003088-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003089
3090- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3091 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3092 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003093
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003094- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3095 been added: -X and -E.
3096
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003097Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003098-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003099
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003100- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3101 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3102
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003103C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003105
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003106- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3107 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3108 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3109 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3110 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3111
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003112- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3113 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3114 as long) arguments.
3115
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003116- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3117 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3118 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3119 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3120 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3121 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3122
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003123- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3124 input.
3125
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003126New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003127-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003128
3129Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003130-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003131
3132Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003133-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003134
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003135- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3136 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3137 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3138
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003139- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3140 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3141 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003142 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003143
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3145 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3146 import signal
3147 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003148
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003149 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003150 while 1:
3151 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003152 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003153 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3154 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3155 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3156 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003157
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003158
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003159What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3160===========================
3161
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003162*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3163
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003164Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003166
3167- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3168 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3169 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3170
3171- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3172 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3173 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3174 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3175 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3176 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3177 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003178
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003179- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003180 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003181 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3182 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3183 associate a docstring with a property.
3184
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003185- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3186 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3187 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3188 other built-in object types.
3189
3190- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3191 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3192 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3193 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3194 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3195
3196- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3197 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3198
3199- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3200 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003201 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003202 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3203 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3204 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3205 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3206 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3207
3208- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3209 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3210 class.
3211
3212- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3213 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3214 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3215 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3216
3217- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3218 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3219 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3220 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3221
3222- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3223 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3224
3225- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3226 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3227 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3228 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3229 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003230 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003231 with the same value as s.
3232
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003233- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3234
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003235Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003237
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003238- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3239
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003240- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3241 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3242 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3243 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3244 objects.
3245
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003246- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3247 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003248 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3249 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3250
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003251- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3252 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3253 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3254
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003255Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003256-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003257
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003258- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3259 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3260 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3261 by the instances.
3262
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003263- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3264 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3265 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3266
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003267- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3268 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3269 before the entire comparison is complete.
3270
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003271- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3272 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3273 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3274
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003275- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3276 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3277 getwriter().
3278
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003279- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3280 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3281
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003282- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003283 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3284 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3285
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003286- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3287 iterable object.
3288
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003289- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3290 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003291
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003292- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3293 authentication.
3294
3295- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3296 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003297
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003298- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003299 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3300 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3301 a sample driver.)
3302
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003303Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003304-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003305
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003306- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3307 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3308 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3309 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3310 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3311 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3312 kernel has large file support.
3313
3314- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3315 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3316 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3317 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3318 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3319
3320- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3321 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3322 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3323
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003325-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003326
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003327- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3328 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3329
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003330New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003331-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003332
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003333- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3334 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3335
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003336Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003338
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003339- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3340 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3341 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3342 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3343 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3344
3345- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3346 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3347 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3348 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3349
3350- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3351 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3352
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003353Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003355
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003356- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003357 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3358 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003359
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003360
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003361What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3362===========================
3363
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003364*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3365
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003366Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003368
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003369- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3370 big to represent as a C double.
3371
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003372- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3373 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3374 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3375 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3376 restriction).
3377
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003378- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3379 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3380 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3381 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3382 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3383
3384 >>> dir([])
3385 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3386 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3387 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3388 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3389 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3390 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3391 'reverse', 'sort']
3392
3393 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3394
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003395- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003396 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3397 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3398 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3399 OverflowError exception.
3400
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003401- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003402 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003403 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3404 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3405 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3406 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3407 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003408 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3410 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3411
3412 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3413 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3414 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3415 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003416
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003417- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003418 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3419 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3420 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3421 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3422 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3423 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3424 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3425 once it is created.
3426
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003427- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3428 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3429 (key, value) pairs.
3430
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003431- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003432 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3433 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3434
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003435- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3436 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3437 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3438 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3439 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003440
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003441- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003442 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3443 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3444
3445 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3446
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003447- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003448 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3449
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003450Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003452
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003453- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003454 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3455 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003456
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003457- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3458 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3459 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3460 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3461 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3462 in this area anymore).
3463
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003464- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3465 threading.Timer.
3466
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003467- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3468 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3469
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003470- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003471 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3472
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003473- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003474 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3475 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3476 converted to Python longs.
3477
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003478- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003479 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3480
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003481- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3482 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3483 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3484
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003485Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003486-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003487
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003488- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3489 division operators as per PEP 238.
3490
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003491Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003492-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003493
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003494- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3495 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3496 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3497 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3498
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003499C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003501
3502- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003503
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003504- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3505 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003506 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003507
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003508 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3509 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003510 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003511 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003512
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003513- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003514 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3515 module:
3516
3517 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003518
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003519 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3520 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003521
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003522 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3523 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003524
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003525 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3526
3527 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3528
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003529- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003530 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3531 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3532 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003533
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003534New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003535-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003536
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003537- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3538 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3539 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3540 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3541 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003542
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003543Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003545
3546Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003547-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003548
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003549- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3550 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3551 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3552 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003553 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3554 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3555 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3556 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3557 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003558
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003559- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003560 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3561
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003562
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003563What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3564===========================
3565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3567
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003568Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003570
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003571- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3572 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3573
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003574- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3575 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3576 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003577
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003578- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3579 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3580 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3581 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003582
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003583- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3584
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003586
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003587Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003589
3590- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003591 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003592 the module docstring for details.
3593
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003594Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003596
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003597- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003598 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3599 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3600 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003601
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003602- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3603 Nick Mathewson.
3604
3605Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003606----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003607
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003608- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3609 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3610 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3611 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3612 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3613 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3614 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3615 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3616
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003617- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3618 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3619 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3620 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3621
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003622- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3623 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3624 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3625 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3626 come a long way).
3627
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003628- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3629 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3630 write filters for these warnings).
3631
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003632- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3633 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3634 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3635 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3636 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3637
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003638- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3639 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3640 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3641 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3642 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3643 older distribution.
3644
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003645Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003647
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003648- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3649 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003650 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003651
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003652- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3653 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3654 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3655
3656- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3657
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003658- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3659
3660- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3661
3662- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3663
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003665
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003666- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3667
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003668New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003670
3671C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003673
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003674- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3675 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3676 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3677 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3678 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3679 against buffer overruns.
3680
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003681- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003682 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3683 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003684 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3685 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3686 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3687
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003688- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3689 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3690 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3691 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3692 deprecated.
3693
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003694Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003695-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003696
3697- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3698 relevant is found.
3699
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003700
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003701What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003702===========================
3703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3705
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003706Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003708
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003709- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3710 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3711 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3712 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3713 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3714 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3715 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3716 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003717 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003718 repaired.
3719
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003720- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003721 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003722 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3723 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3724 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3725 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3726 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3727 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3728 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3729 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3730
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003731- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3732 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3733 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3734 leading BMO character).
3735
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003736- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3737 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3738 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3739
3740 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3741 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3742 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003743
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003744 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3745 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3746 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3747 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3748 for various simple to use conversions.
3749
3750 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3751 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3752
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3754 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3755 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3756 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3757 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3758 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3759 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3760 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3761 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3762 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3763 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3764 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3765 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3766 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3767 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003768
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003769- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3770 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3771 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003772 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003773 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003774
3775 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003776 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3777 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3778 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3779 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3780 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003781 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3782 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003783
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003784 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3785 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3786 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003787 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003788
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003789- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3790 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3791 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3792 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3793 floating arithmetic,
3794
3795 x = 9007199254740992.0
3796 print long(x)
3797
3798 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3799 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3800 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3801 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3802 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3803 functions are of good quality).
3804
3805 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3806 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3807 algorithms to break.
3808
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003809- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3810 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3811 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3812 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3813 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3814 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3815 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3816 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3817 order.
3818
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003819- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3820 operation along the most common code paths.
3821
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003822- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3823 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3824
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003825- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3826 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3827 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3828 {}.update(UserDict())
3829
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003830- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3831 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3832 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3833 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3834 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3835 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3836 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3837 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3838
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003839- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003840 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003842 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003843 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3844 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003845 join() method of strings
3846 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003847 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3848 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003850 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003851
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003852- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3853 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3854
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003855- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3856 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3857
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003858- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3859 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3860 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3861 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3862
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003863- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3864 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003865 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003866 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3867 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003868
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003869- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3870
3871
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003872Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003874
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003875- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003876 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003877 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3878 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3879
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003880- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3881 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3882
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003883- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3884 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3885 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3886 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3887
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003888- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3889 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3890 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3891
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003892- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3893
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003894- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3895
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003896- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3897 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3898 that are still imported into string.py).
3899
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003900- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3901
3902- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3903 Now it does.
3904
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003905- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3906
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003907- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3908 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3909 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3910 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3911 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003912 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3913 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003914
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003915- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3916 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3917 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3918 'help(object)'.
3919
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003920Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003921-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003922
3923- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003924 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003925 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3926 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3927
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003928- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003929 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3930 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003931
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003932C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003934
3935- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3936 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937
3938----
3939
3940**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**