blob: baa3da3fe7412fa7b30f5422f834ae96cd914981 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000015- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
16 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
17 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
18 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
19 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
20
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000021- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
22 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000023
24- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
25 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
26 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
27 #693195.)
28
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000029- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
30 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000031
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000032- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
33 variables to store internal data. As a result, any atempts to use the
34 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
35 interpreter executions, would fail.
36
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000037Extension modules
38-----------------
39
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000040- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
41 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
42
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000043- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
44 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
45 See SF bug #692416.
46
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000047- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
48 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
49
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000050- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
51 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
52 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000053
54Library
55-------
56
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +000057- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
58 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
59
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +000060- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
61 execution speed of expressions and statements.
62
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +000063- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
64 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
65 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
66 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
67 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
68 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
69
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +000070- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
71 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
72 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000073
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +000074- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
75 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
76 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
77
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000078Tools/Demos
79-----------
80
81TBD
82
83Build
84-----
85
Neal Norwitz2c92c6e2003-02-28 17:24:00 +000086- Fix build problems when _iconv_codec failed. (SF bug #690012.)
87
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +000088- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
89 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000090
91C API
92-----
93
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +000094- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +000095 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
96
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +000097- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
98 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
99 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000100
101New platforms
102-------------
103
104TBD
105
106Tests
107-----
108
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000109- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
110 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000111
112Windows
113-------
114
115TBD
116
117Mac
118---
119
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000120- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
121 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000122
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000123- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
124 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000125
Jack Jansen4213e272003-02-27 22:52:58 +0000126- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000127
128
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000129What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
130=================================
131
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000132*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000133
134Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000135-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000136
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000137- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
138 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
139 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
140
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000141- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
142 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
143 (SF patch #664376.)
144
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000145- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
146 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
147 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
148 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
149 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
150 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000151 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000152
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000153- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
154 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
155 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
156 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000157 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000158
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000159- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
160 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
161 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
162 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
163 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
164 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
165 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
166 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
167 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
168 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
169 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
170
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000171- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
172 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
173 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
174 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
175 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
176 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
177
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000178- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
179 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
180
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000181- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
182 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
183 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
184 case.)
185
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000186- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
187 passed as unicode strings.
188
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000189- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
190 See SF bug #683467.
191
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000192- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
193 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
194
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000195- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
196
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000197- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
198
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000199- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
200 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
201 arguments.
202
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000203- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
204 See SF bug #667147.
205
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000206- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000207 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000208 See SF bug #676155.
209
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000210- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000211 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000212 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
213 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
214 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
215 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
216 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
217 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000218
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000219Extension modules
220-----------------
221
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000222- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
223 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
224 tp_as_number pointer.
225
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000226- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
227 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
228 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
229 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
230 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
231
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000232- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
233
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000234- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
235
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000236- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000237 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000238 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
239 patch #678531.)
240
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000241- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
242 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
243
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000244- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
245 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
246
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000247- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
248 library.
249
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000250- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
251
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000252- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
253 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
254 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
255
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000256- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
257
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000258- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
259 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
260
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000261- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000262
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000263- datetime changes:
264
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000265 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
266 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
267 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
268 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
269 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
270 now.
271
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000272 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000273 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
274 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000275
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000276 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000277 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000278 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
279 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
280 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
281 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000282
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000283 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
284 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
285 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000286 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
287
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000288 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
289 by a later example coded by Guido.
290
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000291 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000292 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
293 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
294 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000295 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
296 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
297
298 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
299 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
300 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
301 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
302 tzinfo subclass instance.
303
304 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
305 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
306 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
307 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
308 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
309 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
310 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
311 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000312
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000313 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
314 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
315 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
316 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
317 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000318 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
319
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000320 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000321
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000322 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
323 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
324 as a naive datetime object.
325
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000326 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
327 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
328 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
329
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000330 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
331 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
332 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
333 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
334 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
335 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
336 comparison.
337
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000338 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
339 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
340 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
341 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000342 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000343
344 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000345
346 and ::
347
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000348 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
349
350 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
351 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
352 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
353 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
354
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000355 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
356 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
357 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
358 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
359 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
360
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000361 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
362 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000363 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
364 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000365
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000366Library
367-------
368
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000369- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
370 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
371
372- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
373 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
374 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
375 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
376 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
377 See PEP 307 for details.
378
379- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
380 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
381
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000382- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
383 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000384 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000385 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
386 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000387 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000388
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000389- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
390 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
391
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000392- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
393 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
394 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
395
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000396- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
397
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000398- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
399 exception.
400
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000401- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
402 class.
403
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000404- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
405 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
406 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
407
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000408- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
409 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
410
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000411- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000412 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
413 See SF bug #659228.
414
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000415- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
416 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
417 See SF patch #651082.
418
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000419- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000420
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000421- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
422 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
423
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000424- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000425 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000426
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000427- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
428 DOS paths from other platforms.
429
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000430Tools/Demos
431-----------
432
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000433- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
434 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
435 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
436 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
437 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
438 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
439 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
440 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
441 example:
442
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000443 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
444 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000445
446 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
447
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000448
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000449Build
450-----
451
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000452- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
453 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
454 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000455 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
456
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000457 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
458
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000459- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
460 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
461 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
462 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
463 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
464 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
465 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
466 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
467 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
468
469- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
470 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
471 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
472 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
473
474- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
475 from the Tools/scripts directory.
476
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000477C API
478-----
479
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000480- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
481 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000482
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000483- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
484 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
485 tp_as_number pointer.
486
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000487- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
488 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
489 (SF #681367)
490
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000491- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
492 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
493 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
494 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000495
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000496Tests
497-----
498
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000499- Several tests weren't being run rom regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
500 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
501 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
502 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
503 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
504 pydoc.)
505
506- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
507
508- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000509
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000510Windows
511-------
512
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000513- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
514 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
515 time).
516
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000517- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
518 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
519
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000520- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
521 release without strong cryptography.
522
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000523- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000524 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000525
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000526- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
527 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
528
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000529Mac
530---
531
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000532- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
533 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000534
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000535- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
536 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
537 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000538
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000539- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
540 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000541
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000542- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
543 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
544 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
545 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000546
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000547- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000548 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
549 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
550 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000551
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000552
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000553What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000554=================================
555
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000556*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000557
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000558Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000559--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000560
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000561- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
562
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000563- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
564 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000565 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000566 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000567 a different meaning than before.
568
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000569- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000570 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000571 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000572
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000573- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000574 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000575 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000576
577- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
578 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
579 and deallocation.
580
581- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
582 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
583
584- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
585 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
586 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
587 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
588 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
589
590- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
591 now detected by the garbage collector.
592
593- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
594 [SF bug 519621]
595
596- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
597 identifier.
598
599- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
600 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
601 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
602 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
603 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
604 [SF bug 563060]
605
606- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
607 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
608 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
609 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
610 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
611
612- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
613 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
614 not called. [SF bug #537450]
615
616- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
617
618- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
619 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
620 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
621 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
622 state of the slots would be lost.)
623
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000624Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000625-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000626
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000627- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000628 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
629 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
630 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
631 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000632 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
633 Jython 2.1.
634
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000635- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000636 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000637 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
638 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
639 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
640 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
641 these, see PEP 302.
642
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000643- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
644 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
645 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
646
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000647- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
648 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
649 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
650
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000651- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
652 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
653 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
654
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000655- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
656 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
657 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
658 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
659 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
660 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
661 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
662 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
663 releases or implementations.
664
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000665- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000666 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
667 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000668
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000669- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
670 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
671
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000672- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
673 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
674 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
675
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000676- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
677 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
678
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000679- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
680 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000681 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
682 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000683
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000684- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
685 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
686 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
687 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
688 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
689
690 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
691 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
692 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
693 pattern.
694
695 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
696 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
697 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
698 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
699
700 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
701 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
702 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
703 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
704 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
705 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
706
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000707- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
708 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
709 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
710 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
711 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
712 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
713 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
714 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000715
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000716- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
717 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
718 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
719 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
720 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000721 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
722 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
723 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
724 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
725 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
726 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
727 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000728
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000729- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
730 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
731
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000732- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
733 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
734 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
735 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
736 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
737 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
738 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
739 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
740 to Zack Weinberg!
741
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000742- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
743 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
744 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
745 type. This has been fixed now.
746
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000747- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
748 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
749 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
750
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000751- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
752 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
753 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
754 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
755 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
756 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
757 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
758 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000759 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000760
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000761- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
762 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
763 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000764
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000765- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
766 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
767 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
768 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
769 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
770 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
771 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
772 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000773 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000774 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
775 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
776
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000777- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
778 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
779 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
780 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
781 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
782 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
783 this.)
784
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000785- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
786 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000787 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000788 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000789 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
790 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000791 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
792 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000793
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000794- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
795 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
796 currently running.
797
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000798- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
799 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
800 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
801 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
802
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000803- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
804 as directory names.
805
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000806- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
807 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
808
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000809- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
810 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
811
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000812- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000813 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
814 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000815
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000816- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
817 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
818 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
819 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
820 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
821
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000822- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
823 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
824 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
825 removed.
826
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000827- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
828 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
829 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
830
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000831- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
832 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
833 to __debug__.
834
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000835- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
836 string to the left with zeros. For example,
837 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
838
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000839- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
840 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
841 deprecated now.
842
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000843- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
844 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
845 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000846
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000847- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
848 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
849 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
850 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
851 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000852
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000853- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
854 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
855
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000856- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
857 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
858 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000859 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000860 is backward compatible.
861
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000862- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
863 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
864 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
865 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
866 could access a pointer to freed memory.
867
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000868- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
869 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
870 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
871 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
872 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
873 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000874
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000875- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
876 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
877
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000878- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
879 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
880
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000881- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
882 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
883 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
884 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
885 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
886
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000887- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
888 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
889 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
890
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000891- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000892 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
893
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000894- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
895 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
896 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000897
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000898- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
899 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
900
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000901- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
902 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
903 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
904
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000905- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
906
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000907Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000908-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000909
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000910- Added three operators to the operator module:
911 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
912 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
913 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
914
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000915- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
916
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000917- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
918 archives.
919
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000920- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
921 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
922 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
923
924 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
925
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000926- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
927 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
928 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000929 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000930
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000931- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
932 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
933 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
934 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000935 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
936 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
937 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
938 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000939
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000940- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
941 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000942
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000943- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
944
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000945- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
946 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
947
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000948- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
949 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
950 supported.
951
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000952- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
953
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000954- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
955 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000956
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000957- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
958 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
959
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000960- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
961
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000962- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
963 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
964
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000965- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
966 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
967 functions but callable type objects.
968
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000969- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000970 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000971 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000972
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000973- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
974 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000975
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000976- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
977 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000978
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000979- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
980 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
981 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
982 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
983
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000984- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
985 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000986
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000987- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
988 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
989 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
990 and __imul__.
991
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000992- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000993 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
994 is called.
995
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000996- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
997 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
998 interpreter was compiled.
999
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001000- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1001 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1002 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001003 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001004 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1005 1, not 2.
1006
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001007- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1008 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1009 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1010 limit.
1011
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001012- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1013 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1014 bug #623464.
1015
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001016- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1017 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1018 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1019 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1020
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001021Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001022-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001023
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001024- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1025
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001026- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1027 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1028 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1029 with Python 2.3a2.
1030
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001031- os.path exposes getctime.
1032
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001033- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001034 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001035 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001036 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001037 unit tests of floating point results.
1038
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001039- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1040 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1041 has been increased.
1042
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001043- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1044 executed.
1045
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001046- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1047 postinstallation script.
1048
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001049- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1050 test the current module.
1051
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001052- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001053 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1054 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1055 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1056 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1057
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001058- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001059 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001060 Ward's Optik package.
1061
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001062- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1063 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1064 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1065 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1066
1067- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1068 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001069 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001070
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001071- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1072 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1073 shelf are binary pickles.
1074
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001075- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1076 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1077
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001078- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1079 modules are iterators now.
1080
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001081- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1082 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1083 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1084 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1085 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1086 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001087
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001088- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1089 with their entity value.
1090
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001091- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1092
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001093- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1094 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001095
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001096- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1097 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001098 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001099
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001100- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1101 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1102 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1103 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1104 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1105 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1106 main():
1107
1108 import locale
1109 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1110
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001111- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1112 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1113
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001114- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1115 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1116 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1117 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1118 to the new standard.
1119
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001120- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1121 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1122 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1123 an extension to the database.
1124
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001125- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1126 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1127 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1128 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001129 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001130
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001131- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001132 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001133
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001134- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1135 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1136 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1137 bounded integers.
1138
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001139- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1140 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1141 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1142 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1143 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1144 in existence.
1145
1146 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1147 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1148 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1149 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1150 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1151 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1152
1153 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1154 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1155 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1156 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1157
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001158- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1159 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1160 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1161
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001162- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1163
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001164- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1165 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1166 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1167 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1168
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001169- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1170 argument.
1171
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001172- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1173 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1174 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1175 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1176 [SF patch 560794].
1177
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001178- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1179 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1180 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001181 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1182 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1183 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001184
1185- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1186 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001187
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001188- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1189 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1190 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1191 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001192
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001193- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1194 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1195 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1196 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1197 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1198
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001199- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001200
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001201- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1202
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001203- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1204 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1205 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1206 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1207 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1208 identical to None.
1209
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001210- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1211 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1212 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1213 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1214 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1215 results now.
1216
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001217- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1218 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1219
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001220- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1221 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1222 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1223 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1224 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1225 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1226 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1227 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1228
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001229- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1230
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001231- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1232 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1233
1234- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1235 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1236 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1237 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1238 and other systems.
1239
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001240- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1241 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1242 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1243 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 +00001244 work well with these.
1245
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001246- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1247
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001248- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001249 connections.
1250
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001251- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1252 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1253 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1254
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001255- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1256 sets
1257
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001258- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1259 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1260 name.
1261
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001262- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1263 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1264 passed in.
1265
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001266- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001267 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001268 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1269 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001270
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001271- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1272
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001273- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1274
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001275- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1276 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1277 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1278
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001279- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1280 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1281 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1282 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001283 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001284
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001285- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001286 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001287 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001288
1289- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1290 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1291 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1292
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001293- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001294 the value of its expression argument.
1295
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001296- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1297 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1298 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1299
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001300- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1301 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1302 skipstone browser was included.
1303
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001304- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1305 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1306
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001307Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001308-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001309
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001310- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1311 names in addition to accepting file names.
1312
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001313- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1314 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1315 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1316 still used and useful.)
1317
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001318- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1319 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1320 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1321 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001322
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001323- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1324 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1325 the generated binary.
1326
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001327Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001328-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001329
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001330- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1331
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001332- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1333 except in the hands of experts.
1334
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001335- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001336 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1337 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1338 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001339
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001340- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1341 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1342 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1343 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1344 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1345 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1346 builds.
1347
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001348- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1349 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1350 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1351 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1352 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1353 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1354 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1355 new type.
1356
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001357- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001358
1359 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1360 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1361 positive infinities.
1362
1363 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1364 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1365 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1366 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1367 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1368 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1369 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1370
1371 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1372
1373 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1374
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001375- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1376 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1377 size of the executable.
1378
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001379- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1380 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1381 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1382 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001383
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001384- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1385
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001386- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1387 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1388 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001389
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001390- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1391 well as Unix.
1392
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001393- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1394 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1395 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1396 modules in the README file for details.
1397
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001398C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001399-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001400
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001401- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1402 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001403 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001404 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001405 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001406
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001407- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1408 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1409 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1410 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1411 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1412 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001413 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001414 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1415 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1416 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1417 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1418 aligned.)
1419
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001420- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1421 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1422 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1423
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001424- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1425 level.
1426
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001427- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1428 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1429 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1430 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1431 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1432
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001433- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1434 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1435 code.
1436
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001437- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1438 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1439 adjusting for negative indices.
1440
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001441- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1442 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1443 object.
1444
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001445- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1446 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1447 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1448
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001449- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1450 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001451
1452- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1453
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001454- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1455 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1456 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1457 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1458
1459- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1460
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001461- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001462
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001463- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001464 without going through the buffer API.
1465
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001466- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001467
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001468- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1469 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1470 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1471 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1472
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001473- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1474 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1475
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001476- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001477 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1478
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001479New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001480-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001481
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001482- OpenVMS is now supported.
1483
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001484- AtheOS is now supported.
1485
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001486- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1487
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001488- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1489
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001490Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001491-----
1492
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001493- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1494 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1495 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001496
1497Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001498-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001499
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001500- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1501 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1502 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1503 bugs.
1504 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001505 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001506 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1507 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001508 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001509
1510- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001511 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001512
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001513- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1514 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1515
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001516- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1517 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001518 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001519 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1520
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001521- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1522 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1523 use files" uninstall option).
1524
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001525- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1526
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001527- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1528 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1529
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001530- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1531 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1532 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1533
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001534- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1535 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1536 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1537 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1538 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001539 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1540 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1541 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001542
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001543- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001544 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001545 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1546 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1547 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1548 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1549 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1550 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1551 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1552 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1553 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1554 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1555 work around.
1556
1557- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1558 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1559 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1560 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1561 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1562 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1563 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1564 specified with O_CREAT too).
1565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001566Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001567----
1568
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001569- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001570
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001571- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1572 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1573 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1574
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001575- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1576 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1577 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1578
1579- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1580 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1581 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1582 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1583 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1584 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1585 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1586 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001587
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001588- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1589 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1590 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001591
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001592- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1593 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1594 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1595 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1596 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001597
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001598- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1599 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1600 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001601
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001602- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1603 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001604
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001605- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1606 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1607 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1608 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1609 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001610
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001611- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1612 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1613 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1614
1615- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1616 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1617 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001618
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001619- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1620 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1621 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1622 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001623 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001624
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001625- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1626 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001627
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001628- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1629 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001630
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001631- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001632 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001633 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1634 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001635
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001636
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001637What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001638===============================
1639
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001640*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1641
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001642Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001643--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001644
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001645- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1646 with a custom metaclass.
1647
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001648Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001649-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001650
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001651- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1652 are proxies.
1653
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001654Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001656
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001657- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1658 very short strings.
1659
1660- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1661 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1662 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1663 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1664 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001666Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001667-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001668
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001669- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1670 close or delete time).
1671
1672- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1673 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1674
1675- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1676
1677- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001678 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001679
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001680Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001681-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001682
1683Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001684-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001685
1686C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001687-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001688
1689New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001690-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001691
1692Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001693-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001694
1695Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001696-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001697
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001698- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1699
1700- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1701 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1702
1703- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1704 deleted at process exit time.
1705
1706- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1707 in backslash.
1708
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001709Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001710----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001711
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001712- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1713 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1714 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1715
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001716
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001717What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001718===========================
1719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001720*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1721
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001722Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001723--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001724
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001725- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1726 been extensively updated. See
1727
1728 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1729
1730 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1731
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001732- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1733 deleted!
1734
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001735- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1736 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1737 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1738 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1739 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1740
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001741- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1742
1743 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1744 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1745
1746 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1747 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1748 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1749 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1750 supported anyway.
1751
1752 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1753 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1754
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001755- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1756 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1757 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1758 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1759 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001760
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001761- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1762 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1763 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1764
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001765Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001766-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001767
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001768- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1769 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1770 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1771 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1772 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1773 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001774 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1775 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1776 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1777 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001778
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001779- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1780 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1781 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1782
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001783Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001784-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001785
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001786- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1787
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001788Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001789-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001790
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001791- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1792 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1793 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1794 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1795 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1796 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1797
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001798- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1799
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001800- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1801
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001802- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1803
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001804- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1805 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1806 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1807
1808- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1809
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001810Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001811-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001812
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001813- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1814 off a search on Google.
1815
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001816Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001817-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001818
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001819- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1820 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1821 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1822 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1823 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1824 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1825 other platforms should do likewise.
1826
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001827- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1828 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1829 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1830
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001831C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001832-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001833
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001834- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1835 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1836 producing key-value pairs.
1837
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001838- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001839 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001840 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1841 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1842 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1843 previously went unchallenged.
1844
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001845New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001846-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001847
1848Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001849-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001850
1851Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001852-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001853
1854Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001855----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001856
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001857- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1858 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001859
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001860- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1861 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1862 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1863 home.
1864
1865
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001866What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001867===========================
1868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001869*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1870
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001871Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001872--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001873
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001874- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1875 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001876
1877 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001878 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001879
1880 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1881 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001882 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001883 This needs to be documented.
1884
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001885- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1886 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1887
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001888- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1889 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1890 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1891
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001892- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1893 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1894
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001895- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1896 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1897 class forbids it).
1898
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001899- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1900 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1901 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1902
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001903- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1904
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001905Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001906-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001907
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001908- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1909 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001910 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001911
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001912- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1913 (like 1 + '').
1914
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001915Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001916-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001917
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001918- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1919 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1920 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1921 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001922 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001923 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1924
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001925- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1926 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1927 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1928 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1929
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001930- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1931 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001932 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1933 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1934 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001935
1936- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1937 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001938
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001939- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1940 bytes on its input.
1941
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001942Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001943-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001944
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001945- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001946 convenience function.
1947
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001948- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1949 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1950 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001951 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1952 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1953 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1954 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1955 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1956 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001957
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001958- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1959 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1960 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1961 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1962
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001963- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1964 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1965 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1966
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001967- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1968 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1969 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1970 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1971
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001972- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1973 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001974 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001975 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1976 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1977 new -l and -e options.
1978
1979- statcache is now deprecated.
1980
1981- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1982 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001983 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001984 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1985 time properly taken into account.
1986
1987- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1988 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1989 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1990 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1991
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001992Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001993-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001994
1995Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001996-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001997
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001998- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1999 is built with libdb3 if available.
2000
2001- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2002
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002003C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002004-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002005
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002006- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2007 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2008 PySequence_Size().
2009
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002010- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2011
2012- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2013 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2014 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2015
2016- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2017 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2018
2019- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2020 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2021
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002022New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002023-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002024
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002025- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2026 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2027
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002028- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2029 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2030
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002031- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2032
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002033Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002034-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002035
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002036- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2037 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2038
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002039Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002040-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002041
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002042Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002043----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002044
2045- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2046 removed completely in the next release.
2047
2048- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2049 OSX.
2050
2051- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2052 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2053
2054- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2055
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002056
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002057What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002058===========================
2059
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002060*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2061
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002062Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002063--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002064
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002065- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002066 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002067 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002068 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2069 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002070 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2071 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002072 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2073 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002074
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002075- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2076 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2077
2078- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2079 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2080
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002081Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002082-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002083
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002084- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2085 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2086 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2087 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2088 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2089 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2090 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2091 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2092
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002093- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2094 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2095 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2096 example).
2097
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002098- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002099 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002100 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002101 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002102
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002103- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2104 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2105 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002106 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002107
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002108- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2109 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2110 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2111 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2112 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2113 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2114
2115 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2116
2117 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2118
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002119Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002120-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002121
2122- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2123
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002124- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2125
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002126- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2127 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002128
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002129- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2130 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2131 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2132 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2133 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2134 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002135 attributes.
2136
2137- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2138 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2139 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002140
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002141- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2142 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2143 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002144
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002145- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2146 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2147 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002148 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2149 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2150
2151- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2152 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002153
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002154Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002155-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002156
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002157- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2158 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2159
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002160- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2161 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2162 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2163 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2164
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002165- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2166 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2167 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2168 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2169
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002170 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2171 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2172 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2173 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2174 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2175 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2176 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2177 without losing information).
2178
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002179- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002180 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2181 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2182 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2183 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2184 module).
2185
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002186 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002187 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2188 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2189 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2190 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002191
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002192- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002193 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2194 encoding.
2195
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002196- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2197 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2198
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002199- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002200 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2201
2202- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2203 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2204 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2205 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2206
2207- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2208
2209- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2210 ON, and OFF.
2211
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002212- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2213 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2214
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002215Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002216-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002217
2218- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2219 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2220 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002221
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002222- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2223 been added: -X and -E.
2224
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002225Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002226-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002227
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002228- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2229 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2230
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002231C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002232-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002233
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002234- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2235 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2236 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2237 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2238 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2239
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002240- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2241 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2242 as long) arguments.
2243
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002244- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2245 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2246 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2247 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2248 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2249 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2250
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002251- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2252 input.
2253
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002254New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002255-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002256
2257Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002258-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002259
2260Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002261-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002262
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002263- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2264 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2265 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2266
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002267- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2268 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2269 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002270 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002271
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002272 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2273 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2274 import signal
2275 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002276
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002278 while 1:
2279 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002280 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002281 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2282 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2283 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2284 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002285
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002286
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002287What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2288===========================
2289
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002290*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2291
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002292Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002293--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002294
2295- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2296 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2297 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2298
2299- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2300 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2301 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2302 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2303 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2304 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2305 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002306
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002307- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002308 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002309 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2310 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2311 associate a docstring with a property.
2312
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002313- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2314 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2315 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2316 other built-in object types.
2317
2318- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2319 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2320 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2321 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2322 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2323
2324- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2325 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2326
2327- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2328 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002329 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002330 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2331 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2332 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2333 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2334 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2335
2336- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2337 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2338 class.
2339
2340- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2341 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2342 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2343 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2344
2345- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2346 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2347 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2348 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2349
2350- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2351 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2352
2353- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2354 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2355 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2356 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2357 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002358 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002359 with the same value as s.
2360
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002361- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2362
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002363Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002364----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002365
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002366- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2367
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002368- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2369 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2370 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2371 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2372 objects.
2373
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002374- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2375 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002376 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2377 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2378
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002379- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2380 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2381 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2382
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002383Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002384-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002385
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002386- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2387 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2388 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2389 by the instances.
2390
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002391- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2392 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2393 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2394
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002395- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2396 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2397 before the entire comparison is complete.
2398
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002399- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2400 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2401 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2402
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002403- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2404 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2405 getwriter().
2406
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002407- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2408 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2409
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002410- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002411 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2412 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2413
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002414- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2415 iterable object.
2416
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002417- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2418 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002419
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002420- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2421 authentication.
2422
2423- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2424 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002425
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002426- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002427 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2428 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2429 a sample driver.)
2430
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002431Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002432-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002433
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002434- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2435 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2436 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2437 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2438 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2439 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2440 kernel has large file support.
2441
2442- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2443 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2444 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2445 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2446 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2447
2448- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2449 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2450 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2451
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002452C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002453-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002454
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002455- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2456 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2457
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002458New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002459-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002460
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002461- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2462 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2463
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002464Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002465-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002466
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002467- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2468 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2469 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2470 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2471 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2472
2473- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2474 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2475 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2476 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2477
2478- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2479 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2480
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002481Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002482-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002483
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002484- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002485 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2486 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002487
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002488
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002489What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2490===========================
2491
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002492*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2493
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002494Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002495----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002496
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002497- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2498 big to represent as a C double.
2499
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002500- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2501 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2502 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2503 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2504 restriction).
2505
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002506- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2507 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2508 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2509 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2510 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2511
2512 >>> dir([])
2513 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2514 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2515 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2516 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2517 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2518 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2519 'reverse', 'sort']
2520
2521 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002523- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002524 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2525 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2526 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2527 OverflowError exception.
2528
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002529- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002530 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002531 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2532 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2533 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2534 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2535 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002536 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002537 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2538 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2539
2540 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2541 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2542 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2543 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002544
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002545- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002546 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2547 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2548 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2549 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2550 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2551 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2552 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2553 once it is created.
2554
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002555- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2556 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2557 (key, value) pairs.
2558
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002559- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002560 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2561 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2562
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002563- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2564 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2565 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2566 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2567 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002568
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002569- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002570 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2571 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2572
2573 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2574
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002575- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002576 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2577
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002578Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002579-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002580
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002581- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002582 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2583 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002584
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002585- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2586 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2587 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2588 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2589 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2590 in this area anymore).
2591
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002592- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2593 threading.Timer.
2594
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002595- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2596 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2597
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002598- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002599 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2600
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002601- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002602 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2603 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2604 converted to Python longs.
2605
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002606- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002607 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2608
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002609- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2610 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2611 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2612
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002613Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002615
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002616- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2617 division operators as per PEP 238.
2618
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002619Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002620-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002621
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002622- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2623 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2624 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2625 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2626
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002627C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002628-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002629
2630- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002631
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002632- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2633 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002634 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002635
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002636 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2637 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002638 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002639 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002640
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002641- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002642 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2643 module:
2644
2645 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002646
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002647 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2648 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002649
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002650 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2651 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002652
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002653 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2654
2655 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2656
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002657- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002658 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2659 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2660 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002661
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002662New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002663-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002664
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002665- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2666 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2667 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2668 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2669 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002670
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002671Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002673
2674Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002675-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002676
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002677- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2678 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2679 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2680 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002681 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2682 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2683 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2684 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2685 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002686
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002687- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002688 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2689
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002690
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002691What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2692===========================
2693
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002694*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2695
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002696Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002697-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002698
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002699- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2700 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2701
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002702- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2703 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2704 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002705
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002706- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2707 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2708 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2709 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002710
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002711- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2712
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002714
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002715Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002716-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002717
2718- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002719 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002720 the module docstring for details.
2721
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002722Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002724
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002725- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002726 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2727 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2728 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002729
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002730- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2731 Nick Mathewson.
2732
2733Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002734----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002735
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002736- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2737 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2738 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2739 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2740 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2741 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2742 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2743 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2744
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002745- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2746 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2747 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2748 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2749
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002750- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2751 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2752 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2753 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2754 come a long way).
2755
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002756- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2757 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2758 write filters for these warnings).
2759
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002760- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2761 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2762 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2763 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2764 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2765
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002766- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2767 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2768 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2769 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2770 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2771 older distribution.
2772
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002773Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002775
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002776- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2777 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002778 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002779
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002780- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2781 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2782 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2783
2784- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2785
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002786- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2787
2788- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2789
2790- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2791
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002792- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002793
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002794- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2795
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002796New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002797-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002798
2799C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002800-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002801
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002802- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2803 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2804 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2805 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2806 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2807 against buffer overruns.
2808
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002809- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002810 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2811 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002812 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2813 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2814 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2815
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002816- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2817 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2818 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2819 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2820 deprecated.
2821
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002822Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002823-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002824
2825- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2826 relevant is found.
2827
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002828
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002829What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002830===========================
2831
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002832*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2833
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002834Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002835----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002836
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002837- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2838 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2839 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2840 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2841 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2842 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2843 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2844 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002845 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002846 repaired.
2847
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002848- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002849 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002850 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2851 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2852 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2853 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2854 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2855 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2856 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2857 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2858
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002859- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2860 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2861 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2862 leading BMO character).
2863
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002864- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2865 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2866 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2867
2868 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2869 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2870 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002871
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002872 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2873 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2874 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2875 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2876 for various simple to use conversions.
2877
2878 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2879 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2880
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002881 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2882 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2883 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2884 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2885 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2886 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2887 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2888 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2889 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2890 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2891 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2892 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2893 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2894 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2895 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002896
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002897- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2898 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2899 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002900 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002901 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002902
2903 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002904 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2905 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2906 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2907 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2908 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002909 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2910 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002911
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002912 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2913 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2914 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002915 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002916
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002917- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2918 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2919 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2920 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2921 floating arithmetic,
2922
2923 x = 9007199254740992.0
2924 print long(x)
2925
2926 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2927 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2928 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2929 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2930 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2931 functions are of good quality).
2932
2933 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2934 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2935 algorithms to break.
2936
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002937- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2938 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2939 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2940 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2941 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2942 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2943 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2944 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2945 order.
2946
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002947- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2948 operation along the most common code paths.
2949
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002950- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2951 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2952
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002953- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2954 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2955 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2956 {}.update(UserDict())
2957
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002958- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2959 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2960 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2961 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2962 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2963 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2964 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2965 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2966
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002967- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002968 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002970 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002971 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2972 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002973 join() method of strings
2974 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002975 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2976 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002977 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002978 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002979
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002980- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2981 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2982
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002983- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2984 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2985
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002986- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2987 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2988 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2989 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2990
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002991- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2992 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002993 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002994 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2995 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002996
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002997- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2998
2999
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003000Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003002
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003003- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003004 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003005 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3006 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3007
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003008- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3009 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3010
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003011- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3012 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3013 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3014 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3015
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003016- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3017 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3018 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3019
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003020- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3021
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003022- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3023
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003024- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3025 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3026 that are still imported into string.py).
3027
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003028- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3029
3030- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3031 Now it does.
3032
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003033- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3034
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003035- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3036 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3037 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3038 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3039 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003040 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3041 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003042
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003043- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3044 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3045 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3046 'help(object)'.
3047
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003048Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003049-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003050
3051- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003052 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003053 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3054 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3055
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003056- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003057 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3058 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003059
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003060C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003061-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003062
3063- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3064 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003065
3066----
3067
3068**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**