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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000015- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
16 functions is now writable.
17
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000018- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
19 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
20 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
21 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
22
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000023- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
24 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
25 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
26 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
27 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000028
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000029- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
30 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
31
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000032Extension modules
33-----------------
34
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000035- Added socket.socketpair().
36
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000037Library
38-------
39
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000040- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
41 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
42 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
43 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
44 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
45 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
46 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
47 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
48 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
49 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
50 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
51 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
52 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
53
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000054Tools/Demos
55-----------
56
57Build
58-----
59
60C API
61-----
62
63Documentation
64-------------
65
66New platforms
67-------------
68
69Tests
70-----
71
72Windows
73-------
74
75Mac
76---
77
78
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000079What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
80=================================
81
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000082*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000083
84Core and builtins
85-----------------
86
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +000087- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
88 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
89 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
90 sensitive code.
91
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000092- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
93 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
94 @staticmethod
95 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000096 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000097
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000098- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
99 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
100 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
101 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
102 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
103 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
104 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
105 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
106 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
107 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
108 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
109
110 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
111 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
112 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
113 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
114 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
115 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
116 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
117
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000118- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
119 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
120
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000121- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000122 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000123
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000124- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000125 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000126 which was missing for no apparent reason.
127
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000128- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000129 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
130 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
131
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000132- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
133 types that support garbage collection.
134
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000135- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
136
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000137- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
138 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
139 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
140 Jython.
141
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000142- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
143
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000144- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
145 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
146
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000147- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
148 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
149 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000150
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000151- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
152 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
153 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
154
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000155Extension modules
156-----------------
157
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000158- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
159
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000160Library
161-------
162
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000163- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
164 TIS-620
165
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000166- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
167 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
168 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
169 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
170 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
171 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
172 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
173 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
174 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
175 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
176
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000177- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
178
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000179- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
180 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
181 same as when the argument is omitted).
182 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
183
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000184- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
185
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000186- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
187 schemes are offered.
188
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000189- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
190
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000191- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
192 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
193 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
194
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000195- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
196
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000197- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
198 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
199
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000200- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
201 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
202 when dummy_threading is being used.
203
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000204- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
205 from a tarfile.
206
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000207- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000208 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000209
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000210- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
211 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
212 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
213 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
214
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000215- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
216 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
217
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000218- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
219 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
220 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
221 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
222 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
223 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
224 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
225 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
226 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
227 by some other method in progress).
228
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000229- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
230 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
231 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000232
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000233- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
234
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000235- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
236 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
237 AM Kuchling.
238
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000239- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
240 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
241 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
242
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000243- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
244 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
245 instead of unsigned.
246
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000247- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000248 no longer part of the public API.
249
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000250- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
251 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
252 string methods of the same name).
253
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000254- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
255 SF patch 982681.
256
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000257- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000258 SF patch 945642.
259
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000260- doctest unittest integration improvements:
261
262 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
263
264 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
265 DocTestSuites.
266
267- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
268 that provide thread-local data.
269
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000270- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
271 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
272
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000273- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
274
275- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
276 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
277 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
278
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000279- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
280
281 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
282 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
283 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000284
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000285 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
286 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
287 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
288 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
289
290 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
291 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
292
293 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
294 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
295 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
296 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
297
298 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
299 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
300 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
301 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
302 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
303
304 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
305 wrapping help output.
306
307 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
308 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
309 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000310
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000311C API
312-----
313
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000314- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
315 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
316 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
317 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
318 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
319 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
320 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
321 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
322 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
323 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
324 its visible semantics have not changed.
325
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000326- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
327 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
328
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000329Documentation
330-------------
331
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000332- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000333
334 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000335 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000336
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000337 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000338
339 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
340
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000341- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000342
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000343Tests
344-----
345
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000346- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000347 platforms that use the Makefile.
348
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000349- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
350 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
351 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
352
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000353
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000354What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
355=================================
356
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000357*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000358
359Core and builtins
360-----------------
361
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000362- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
363 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
364 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
365 objects now (one object instead of three).
366
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000367- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
368 Windows DLLs.
369
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000370- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
371 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000372
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000373- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
374 a new .pyc magic.
375
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000376- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
377 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
378 be there.
379
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000380- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
381 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
382 the LC_NUMERIC category.
383
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000384- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
385 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
386 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
387
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000388- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
389
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000390- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
391 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
392 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000393
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000394- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
395 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
396
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000397- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
398
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000399- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000400 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000401
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000402- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
403
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000404- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
405
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000406- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
407 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
408
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000409- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
410 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
411 Fixes bug #858016 .
412
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000413- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
414 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
415 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
416
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000417- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
418 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
419 improves their performance (about 35%).
420
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000421- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
422 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
423 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
424
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000425- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
426 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
427 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
428 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
429
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000430- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
431 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
432 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
433 length is not known).
434
435- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
436 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000437 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
438 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000439 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
440
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000441- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
442 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
443
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000444- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
445 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
446 keyword arguments.
447
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000448- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
449 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
450 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
451
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000452- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
453 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
454 cases.
455
456- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
457 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
458 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
459 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
460 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
461 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
462 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
463 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
464 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
465 a release build.
466
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000467- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
468 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
469
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000470- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000471 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000472
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000473- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
474 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
475 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
476 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
477 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
478 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
479 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
480 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
481 destroyed.
482
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000483- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
484 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
485 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
486 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
487 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
488 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
489 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
490 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
491
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000492- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
493 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
494 character other than a space.
495
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000496- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
497 by the function object or by the method object, the function
498 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
499 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
500 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
501 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
502 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
503 attributes with the same name.
504
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000505- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
506 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
507 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
508 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
509 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
510 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
511 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
512 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
513 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
514 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
515 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
516 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
517 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
518 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000519
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000520- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
521 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
522 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
523 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
524 This has been repaired.
525
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000526- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
527
528- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
529
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000530- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
531 over a sequence.
532
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000533- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000534 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000535
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000536- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
537
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000538- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
539 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
540 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
541 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
542 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
543 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
544 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
545 records with equal keys is unchanged).
546
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000547- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
548 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
549 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
550
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000551- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
552 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
553 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
554 freelist.
555
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000556- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
557 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
558
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000559- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
560 number.
561
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000562- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
563 a TypeError exception.
564
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000565- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
566 820195.
567
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000568- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
569 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
570 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
571
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000572- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000573 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
574 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000575
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000576- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
577 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
578 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
579
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000580- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
581 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000582 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000583
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000584- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000585 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
586 the first call.
587
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000588
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000589Extension modules
590-----------------
591
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000592- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
593 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
594
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000595- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
596 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
597 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
598 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
599 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
600 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
601 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000602
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000603- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
604
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000605- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
606
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000607- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
608 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
609
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000610- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
611 fewer false positives.
612
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000613- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
614 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
615
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000616- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000617 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
618
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000619- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000620 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000621 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
622 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
623 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000624
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000625- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
626 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
627 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
628 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
629
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000630- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
631 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
632 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
633 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
634 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
635 #897625.
636
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000637- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
638 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
639
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000640- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
641 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
642 and pops on either side of the deque.
643
644- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
645 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
646
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000647- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
648 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
649 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
650 other functions that expect a function argument.
651
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000652- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
653
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000654- os.getsid was added.
655
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000656- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
657 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
658 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
659
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000660- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
661
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000662- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
663
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000664- readline.clear_history was added.
665
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000666- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
667
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000668- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
669
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000670- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
671
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000672- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
673
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000674- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
675
676- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
677
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000678- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
679
680- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
681
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000682- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
683 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
684 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
685
686- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
687 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
688 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
689 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
690 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
691 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
692 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
693
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000694- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
695 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
696 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
697 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000698
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000699- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000700 iterators from a single iterable.
701
702- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
703 of raising a TypeError exception.
704
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000705- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
706 as parameter.
707
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000708Library
709-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000710
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000711- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
712 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
713 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000714
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000715- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
716 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
717 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000718
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000719- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000720
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000721- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
722 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000723
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000724- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
725 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
726
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000727- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
728
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000729- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000730 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000731
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000732- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
733 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
734
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000735- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
736
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000737- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
738 on cygwin and mingw32.
739
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000740- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
741
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000742- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
743 module.
744
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000745- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
746 installation scheme for all platforms.
747
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000748- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000749 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000750
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000751- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
752 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
753 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
754
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000755- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
756 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
757 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
758
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000759- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
760
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000761- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
762
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000763- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
764 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
765
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000766- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
767 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
768 type pattern with the same value exists.
769
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000770- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
771 when run from the command prompt).
772
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000773- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
774 not taken into consideration when caching value.
775
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000776- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
777 default sort).
778
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000779- Added global runctx function to profile module
780
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000781- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
782
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000783- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
784
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000785- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
786
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000787- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000788 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
789 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
790 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
791 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
792 accordingly.
793
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000794- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
795 decoding standards.
796
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000797- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
798 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
799 called for all requests.
800
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000801- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
802 they are passed to the compiler.
803
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000804- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
805 indent, width and depth.
806
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000807- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
808 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
809
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000810- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
811 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
812
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000813- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
814
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000815- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
816
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000817- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
818
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000819- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
820 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
821
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000822- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000823 for better performance.
824
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000825- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000826
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000827- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
828 a string).
829
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000830- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
831
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000832- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
833
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000834- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
835
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000836- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
837
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000838- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
839 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
840 list of fieldnames.
841
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000842- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
843 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
844
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000845- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
846
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000847- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
848 empty lists.
849
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000850- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
851 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
852 and shelves.
853
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000854- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
855 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
856
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000857- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000858 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
859 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000860
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000861- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
862 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000863 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000864
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000865- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000866 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
867 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
868
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000869- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
870 and removed in Py2.4.
871
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000872- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
873
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000874- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
875
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000876Tools/Demos
877-----------
878
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000879- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
880 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
881
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000882- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
883
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000884- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
885 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
886 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
887 destination in situations where both files are given.
888
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000889- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
890 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
891 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
892 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
893
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000894- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
895
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000896- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
897 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
898 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
899 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
900 now.
901
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000902- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
903 in effect
904
905- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
906 C-c C-h
907
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000908- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
909 -d option was given.
910
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000911Build
912-----
913
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000914- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
915 build under OS X.
916
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000917- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
918 --enable-profiling.
919
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000920- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
921 is configured --with-tsc.
922
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000923- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
924 on AMD64.
925
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000926- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
927 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
928
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000929- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
930 removed.
931
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000932- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
933 supported (see PEP 11).
934
935- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
936
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000937- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
938
939- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
940 (see PEP 11).
941
942- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
943 sizeof(char) must be 1.
944
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000945C API
946-----
947
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000948- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
949 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
950 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
951
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000952- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
953 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
954 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
955 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
956
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000957- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
958 generator objects.
959
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000960- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
961 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000962 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
963 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000964
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000965- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
966 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
967
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000968- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
969 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
970 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
971 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
972 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
973
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000974- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
975 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
976 about 10% faster.
977
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000978- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
979 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
980
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000981- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
982 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
983 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
984 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
985
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000986Windows
987-------
988
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000989- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
990 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
991 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
992 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
993
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000994- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
995 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
996 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
997
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000998
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000999What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1000===============================
1001
1002*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1003
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001004IDLE
1005----
1006
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001007- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1008 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1009 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1010 context-menu actions.
1011
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001012- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1013 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1014 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1015 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1016 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1017 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1018 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1019 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1020 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1021
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001022
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001023What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1024=============================================
1025
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001026*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001027
1028Core and builtins
1029-----------------
1030
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001031- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001032 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001033 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1034
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001035Extension modules
1036-----------------
1037
1038- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1039 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1040 than once. This has been fixed.
1041
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001042- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1043 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1044 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1045 call.
1046
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001047- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1048
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001049Library
1050-------
1051
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001052- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1053 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1054
1055- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1056 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1057 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1058 restored.
1059
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001060IDLE
1061----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001062
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001063- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001064
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001065Build
1066-----
1067
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001068- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1069 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1070
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001071C API
1072-----
1073
1074Windows
1075-------
1076
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001077- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1078 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1079
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001080- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1081
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001082Mac
1083---
1084
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001085- Various fixes to pimp.
1086
1087- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1088
1089- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1090 more problems than it solves.
1091
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001092
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001093What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1094=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001095
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001096*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1097
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001098Core and builtins
1099-----------------
1100
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001101- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1102 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1103
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001104- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1105 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001106 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001107
1108- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1109 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1110 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001111 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001112
1113- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1114 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001115
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001116- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1117 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1118 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1119
1120- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001121 770247.
1122
1123- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001124
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001125Extension modules
1126-----------------
1127
1128- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1129 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1130
1131- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1132
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001133- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1134
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001135- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1136 contained within the _strptime module.
1137
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001138- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1139 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1140
1141- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001142 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1143
1144- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1145 the find_class attribute, if present.
1146
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001147- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001148
1149 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1150 (SF bug 763298).
1151
1152 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001153 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1154 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1155 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001156
1157 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1158
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001159Library
1160-------
1161
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001162- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1163
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001164- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1165 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1166 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1167 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1168 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1169 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1170 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1171 or Tester().
1172
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001173- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1174 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1175 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1176 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1177 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1178 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1179 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1180 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1181 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001182
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001183 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001184
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001185- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1186 weren't before was an oversight.
1187
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001188- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1189 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1190
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001191- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1192 when there are no lines.
1193
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001194- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1195 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1196
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001197- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1198 to child processes.
1199
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001200- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1201
1202- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1203
1204- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1205 xmlrpclib.
1206
1207- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1208 responses.
1209
1210- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1211 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1212
1213- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1214 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1215 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1216
1217- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1218 used as patterns.
1219
1220- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1221 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1222 than Tk 8.3.
1223
1224- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1225
1226- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001227
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001228Tools/Demos
1229-----------
1230
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001231- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1232
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001233- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1234
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001235- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001236
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001237Build
1238-----
1239
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001240- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1241
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001242- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1243
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001244- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1245 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001246
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001247- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1248 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1249 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001250
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001251C API
1252-----
1253
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001254- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1255 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1256
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001257Windows
1258-------
1259
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001260- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1261 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1262 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1263 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1264 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1265 Python exception ::
1266
1267 thread.error: can't start new thread
1268
1269 is raised now.
1270
1271- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1272 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1273 instead of from DLL teardown.
1274
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001275Mac
1276---
1277
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001278- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001279 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001280 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1281 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1282 the executable in the bundle.
1283
1284- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001285
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001286- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1287
1288- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1289 on Panther.
1290
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001291What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1292================================
1293
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001294*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001295
1296Core and builtins
1297-----------------
1298
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001299- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1300 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1301 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1302 with the -i option.
1303
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001304- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1305 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1306
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001307- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1308 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1309
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001310- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1311 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1312 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1313 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1314 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1315 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1316 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1317 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1318 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1319 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1320 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1321 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1322 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001323
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001324- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1325 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1326 embedded in a lambda expression.
1327
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001328- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1329 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1330 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1331 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1332 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1333
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001334- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1335 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1336 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1337
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001338- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1339 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1340
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001341- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1342 It's writable again.
1343
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001344- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1345 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1346 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001347 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001348
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001349- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1350 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1351 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1352
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001353Extension modules
1354-----------------
1355
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001356- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1357 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1358
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001359- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1360 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1361 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1362 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1363
1364- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1365 collection.
1366
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001367- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1368 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1369 unique within a single program run.
1370
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001371- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1372 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1373
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001374- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1375 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1376
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001377- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1378 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001379
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001380- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1381
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001382- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1383 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1384
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001385- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1386 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1387 for many BSD-derived systems.
1388
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001389
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001390Library
1391-------
1392
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001393- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1394 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1395 primary ones:
1396
1397 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1398 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1399 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1400
1401 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1402 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1403 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1404 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1405 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1406 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1407
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001408- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1409 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1410 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1411 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1412 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1413 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1414 argument.
1415
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001416- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1417 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1418 in the archive.
1419
1420- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1421 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1422
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001423- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1424 569574).
1425
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001426- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1427 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1428 no more.
1429
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001430- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1431 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1432 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1433 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1434 code coverage.
1435
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001436- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1437 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1438 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001439 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1440 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001441
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001442- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1443 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1444 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001445 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001446
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001447- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1448
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001449- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1450 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1451 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1452 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1453
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001454- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1455 handling.
1456
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001457- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1458 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1459
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001460- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1461 in socket.py.
1462
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001463- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1464
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001465- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1466 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1467 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1468 opener with proxy support.
1469
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001470- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1471
1472- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1473
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001474Tools/Demos
1475-----------
1476
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001477- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1478
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001479- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1480
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001481- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1482 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001483
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001484- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1485 files.
1486
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001487Build
1488-----
1489
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001490- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001491 different root directory.
1492
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001493C API
1494-----
1495
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001496- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1497 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1498 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1499 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1500 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1501 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1502 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1503 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1504 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1505 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1506
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001507- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1508 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1509 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1510 from Python.
1511
1512
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001513New platforms
1514-------------
1515
1516None this time.
1517
1518Tests
1519-----
1520
1521- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1522 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1523
1524Windows
1525-------
1526
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001527- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1528
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001529- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1530 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1531 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1532 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1533 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1534 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1535 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1536 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1537 that's what it's for.
1538
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001539Mac
1540---
1541
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001542- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1543 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1544 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1545 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001546- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1547 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1548- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001549
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001550SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1551------------------------------------
1552
1553430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1554598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1555622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1556661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1557683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1558697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1559713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1560724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1561727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1562729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1563730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1564731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1565732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1566733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1567735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1568740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1569744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1570745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1571747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1572749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1573751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1574753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1575755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1576757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1577760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1578
1579
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001580What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1581================================
1582
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001583*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001584
1585Core and builtins
1586-----------------
1587
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001588- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1589 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1590
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001591- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1592 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1593 and cannot be strings).
1594
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001595- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1596 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1597 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1598 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1599
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001600- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1601 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1602 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1603 Python itself.
1604
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001605- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1606 the referenced object, if it has one.
1607
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001608- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1609 the thread started at
1610 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1611
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001612- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1613 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1614 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1615 placed on a list index.
1616
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001617- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1618 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1619 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1620 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1621
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001622- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1623 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1624 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1625 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1626 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1627 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1628 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1629
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001630- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1631 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1632 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1633 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1634 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1635
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001636- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1637 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001638
1639- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1640 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1641 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1642 #693195.)
1643
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001644- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1645 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001646
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001647- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001648 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001649 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1650 interpreter executions, would fail.
1651
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001652- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001653 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001654 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001655
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001656Extension modules
1657-----------------
1658
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001659- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1660 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1661 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1662 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1663
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001664- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1665 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1666
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001667- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1668 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1669 and Greg Chapman.)
1670
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001671- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1672 recursively.
1673
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001674- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001675 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1676 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1677 leaks.
1678
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001679- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1680
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001681- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1682 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1683 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1684 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1685 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1686 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1687 #705836.
1688
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001689- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001690 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1691
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001692- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1693 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1694 See SF bug #692416.
1695
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001696- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1697 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1698
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001699- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1700 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1701 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001702
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001703- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001704 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1705 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1706
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001707- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1708 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1709 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1710 timeouts to work properly.
1711
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001712Library
1713-------
1714
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001715- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1716 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1717 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1718 future release.
1719
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001720- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1721 for querying platform dependent features.
1722
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001723- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001724
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001725- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1726 pickle protocol versions.
1727
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001728- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1729 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1730 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1731
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001732- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1733
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001734- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1735 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1736 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1737 modules.
1738
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001739- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1740 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1741 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1742
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001743- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1744 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1745
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001746- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1747 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1748 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1749
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001750- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001751 MS Office extensions.
1752
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001753- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1754 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1755
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001756- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1757 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1758
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001759- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1760 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1761 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1762 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1763 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1764 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1765
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001766- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1767 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1768 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001769
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001770- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1771 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1772 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1773
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001774- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1775
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001776- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1777 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1778 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1779
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001780Tools/Demos
1781-----------
1782
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001783- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1784 See the module docstring for details.
1785
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001786Build
1787-----
1788
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001789- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1790 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001791
1792C API
1793-----
1794
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001795- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1796
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001797- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1798 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1799 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1800
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001801- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1802 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001803
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001804 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1805 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1806 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001807
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001808- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001809 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1810
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001811- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1812 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1813 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001814
1815New platforms
1816-------------
1817
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001818None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001819
1820Tests
1821-----
1822
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001823- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1824 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001825
1826Windows
1827-------
1828
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001829- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1830 function.
1831
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001832- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1833 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001834
1835Mac
1836---
1837
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001838- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1839 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001840
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001841- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1842 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001843
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001844- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1845 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1846 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001847
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001848- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001849 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1850 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001851
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001852- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1853 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001854
1855
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001856What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1857=================================
1858
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001859*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001860
1861Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001862-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001863
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001864- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1865 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1866 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1867
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001868- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1869 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1870 (SF patch #664376.)
1871
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001872- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1873 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1874 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1875 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1876 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1877 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001878 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001879
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001880- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1881 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1882 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1883 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001884 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001885
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001886- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1887 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1888 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1889 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1890 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1891 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1892 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1893 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1894 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1895 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1896 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1897
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001898- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1899 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1900 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1901 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1902 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1903 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1904
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001905- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1906 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1907
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001908- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1909 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1910 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1911 case.)
1912
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001913- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1914 passed as unicode strings.
1915
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001916- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1917 See SF bug #683467.
1918
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001919- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1920 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1921
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001922- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1923
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001924- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1925
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001926- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1927 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1928 arguments.
1929
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001930- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1931 See SF bug #667147.
1932
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001933- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001934 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001935 See SF bug #676155.
1936
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001937- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001938 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001939 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1940 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1941 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1942 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1943 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1944 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001945
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001946Extension modules
1947-----------------
1948
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001949- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1950 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1951 tp_as_number pointer.
1952
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001953- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1954 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1955 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1956 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1957 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1958
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001959- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1960
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001961- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1962
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001963- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001964 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001965 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1966 patch #678531.)
1967
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001968- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1969 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1970
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001971- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1972 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1973
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001974- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1975
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001976- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1977 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1978 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1979
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001980- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1981
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001982- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1983 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1984
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001985- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001986
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001987- datetime changes:
1988
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001989 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1990
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001991 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1992 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1993 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1994 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1995 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1996 now.
1997
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001998 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001999 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2000 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002001
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002002 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002003 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002004 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2005 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2006 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2007 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002008
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002009 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2010 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2011 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002012 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2013
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002014 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2015 by a later example coded by Guido.
2016
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002017 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002018 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2019 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2020 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002021 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2022 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2023
2024 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2025 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2026 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2027 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2028 tzinfo subclass instance.
2029
2030 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2031 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2032 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2033 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2034 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2035 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2036 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2037 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002038
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002039 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2040 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2041 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2042 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2043 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002044 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2045
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002046 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002047
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002048 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2049 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2050 as a naive datetime object.
2051
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002052 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2053 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2054 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2055
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002056 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2057 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2058 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2059 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2060 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2061 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2062 comparison.
2063
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002064 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2065 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2066 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2067 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002068 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002069
2070 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002071
2072 and ::
2073
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002074 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2075
2076 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2077 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2078 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2079 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2080
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002081 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2082 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2083 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2084 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2085 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2086
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002087 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2088 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002089 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2090 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002091
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002092Library
2093-------
2094
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002095- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2096 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2097
2098- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2099 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2100 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2101 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2102 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2103 See PEP 307 for details.
2104
2105- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2106 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2107
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002108- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2109 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002110 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002111 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2112 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002113 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002114
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002115- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2116 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2117
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002118- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2119 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2120 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2121
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002122- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2123
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002124- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2125 exception.
2126
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002127- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2128 class.
2129
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002130- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2131 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2132 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2133
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002134- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2135 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2136
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002137- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002138 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2139 See SF bug #659228.
2140
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002141- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2142 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2143 See SF patch #651082.
2144
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002145- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002146
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002147- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2148 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2149
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002150- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002151 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002152
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002153- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2154 DOS paths from other platforms.
2155
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002156Tools/Demos
2157-----------
2158
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002159- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2160 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2161 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2162 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2163 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2164 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2165 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2166 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2167 example:
2168
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002169 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2170 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002171
2172 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2173
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002174
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002175Build
2176-----
2177
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002178- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2179 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2180 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002181 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2182
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002183 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2184
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002185- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2186 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2187 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2188 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2189 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2190 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2191 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2192 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2193 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2194
2195- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2196 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2197 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2198 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2199
2200- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2201 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2202
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002203C API
2204-----
2205
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002206- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2207 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002208
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002209- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2210 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2211 tp_as_number pointer.
2212
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002213- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2214 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2215 (SF #681367)
2216
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002217- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2218 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2219 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2220 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002221
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002222Tests
2223-----
2224
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002225- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002226 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2227 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2228 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2229 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2230 pydoc.)
2231
2232- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2233
2234- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002235
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002236Windows
2237-------
2238
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002239- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2240 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2241 time).
2242
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002243- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2244 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2245
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002246- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2247 release without strong cryptography.
2248
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002249- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002250 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002251
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002252- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2253 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2254
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002255Mac
2256---
2257
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002258- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2259 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002260
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002261- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2262 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2263 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002264
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002265- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2266 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002267
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002268- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2269 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2270 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2271 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002272
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002273- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002274 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2275 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2276 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002277
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002278
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002279What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002280=================================
2281
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002282*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002284Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002285--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002286
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002287- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2288
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002289- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2290 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002291 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002292 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002293 a different meaning than before.
2294
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002295- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002296 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002297 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002298
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002299- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002300 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002301 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002302
2303- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2304 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2305 and deallocation.
2306
2307- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2308 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2309
2310- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2311 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2312 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2313 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2314 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2315
2316- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2317 now detected by the garbage collector.
2318
2319- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2320 [SF bug 519621]
2321
2322- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2323 identifier.
2324
2325- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2326 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2327 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2328 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2329 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2330 [SF bug 563060]
2331
2332- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2333 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2334 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2335 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2336 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2337
2338- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2339 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2340 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2341
2342- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2343
2344- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2345 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2346 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2347 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2348 state of the slots would be lost.)
2349
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002350Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002351-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002352
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002353- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002354 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2355 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2356 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2357 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002358 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2359 Jython 2.1.
2360
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002361- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002362 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002363 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2364 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2365 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2366 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2367 these, see PEP 302.
2368
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002369- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2370 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2371 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2372
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002373- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2374 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2375 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2376
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002377- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2378 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2379 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2380
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002381- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2382 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2383 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2384 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2385 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2386 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2387 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2388 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2389 releases or implementations.
2390
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002391- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002392 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2393 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002394
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002395- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2396 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2397
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002398- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2399 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2400 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2401
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002402- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2403 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2404
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002405- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2406 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002407 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2408 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002409
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002410- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2411 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2412 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2413 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2414 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2415
2416 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2417 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2418 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2419 pattern.
2420
2421 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2422 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2423 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2424 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2425
2426 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2427 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2428 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2429 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2430 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2431 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2432
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002433- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2434 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2435 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2436 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2437 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2438 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2439 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2440 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002441
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002442- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2443 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2444 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2445 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2446 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002447 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2448 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2449 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2450 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2451 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2452 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2453 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002454
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002455- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2456 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2457
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002458- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2459 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2460 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2461 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2462 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2463 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2464 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2465 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2466 to Zack Weinberg!
2467
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002468- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2469 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2470 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2471 type. This has been fixed now.
2472
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002473- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2474 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2475 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2476
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002477- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2478 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2479 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2480 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2481 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2482 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2483 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2484 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002485 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002486
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002487- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2488 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2489 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002490
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002491- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2492 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2493 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2494 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2495 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2496 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2497 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2498 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002499 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002500 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2501 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2502
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002503- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2504 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2505 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2506 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2507 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2508 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2509 this.)
2510
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002511- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2512 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002513 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002514 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002515 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2516 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002517 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2518 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002519
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002520- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2521 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2522 currently running.
2523
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002524- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2525 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2526 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2527 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2528
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002529- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2530 as directory names.
2531
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002532- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2533 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2534
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002535- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2536 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2537
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002538- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002539 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2540 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002541
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002542- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2543 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2544 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2545 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2546 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2547
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002548- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2549 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2550 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2551 removed.
2552
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002553- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2554 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2555 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2556
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002557- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2558 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2559 to __debug__.
2560
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002561- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2562 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2563 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2564
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002565- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2566 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2567 deprecated now.
2568
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002569- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2570 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2571 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002572
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002573- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2574 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2575 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2576 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2577 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002578
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002579- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2580 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2581
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002582- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2583 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2584 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002585 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002586 is backward compatible.
2587
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002588- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2589 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2590 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2591 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2592 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2593
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002594- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2595 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2596 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2597 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2598 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2599 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002600
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002601- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2602 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2603
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002604- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2605 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2606
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002607- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2608 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2609 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2610 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2611 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2612
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002613- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2614 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2615 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2616
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002617- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002618 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2619
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002620- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2621 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2622 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002623
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002624- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2625 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2626
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002627- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2628 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2629 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2630
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002631- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2632
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002633Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002634-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002635
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002636- Added three operators to the operator module:
2637 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2638 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2639 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2640
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002641- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2642
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002643- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2644 archives.
2645
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002646- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2647 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2648 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2649
2650 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2651
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002652- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2653 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2654 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002655 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002656
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002657- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2658 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2659 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2660 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002661 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2662 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2663 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2664 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002665
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002666- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2667 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002668
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002669- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2670
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002671- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2672 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2673
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002674- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2675 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2676 supported.
2677
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002678- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2679
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002680- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2681 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002682
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002683- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2684 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2685
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002686- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2687
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002688- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2689 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2690
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002691- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2692 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2693 functions but callable type objects.
2694
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002695- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002696 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002697 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002698
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002699- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2700 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002701
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002702- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2703 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002704
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002705- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2706 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2707 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2708 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2709
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002710- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2711 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002712
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002713- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2714 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2715 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2716 and __imul__.
2717
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002718- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002719 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2720 is called.
2721
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002722- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2723 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2724 interpreter was compiled.
2725
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002726- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2727 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2728 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002729 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002730 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2731 1, not 2.
2732
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002733- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2734 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2735 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2736 limit.
2737
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002738- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2739 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2740 bug #623464.
2741
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002742- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2743 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2744 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2745 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2746
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002747Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002748-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002749
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002750- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2751
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002752- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2753 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2754 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2755 with Python 2.3a2.
2756
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002757- os.path exposes getctime.
2758
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002759- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002760 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002761 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002762 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002763 unit tests of floating point results.
2764
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002765- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2766 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2767 has been increased.
2768
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002769- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2770 executed.
2771
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002772- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2773 postinstallation script.
2774
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002775- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2776 test the current module.
2777
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002778- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002779 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2780 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2781 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2782 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2783
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002784- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002785 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002786 Ward's Optik package.
2787
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002788- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2789 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2790 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2791 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2792
2793- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2794 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002795 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002796
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002797- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2798 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2799 shelf are binary pickles.
2800
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002801- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2802 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2803
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002804- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2805 modules are iterators now.
2806
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002807- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2808 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2809 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2810 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2811 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2812 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002813
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002814- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2815 with their entity value.
2816
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002817- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2818
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002819- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2820 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002821
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002822- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2823 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002824 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002825
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002826- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2827 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2828 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2829 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2830 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2831 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2832 main():
2833
2834 import locale
2835 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2836
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002837- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2838 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2839
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002840- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2841 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2842 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2843 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2844 to the new standard.
2845
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002846- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2847 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2848 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2849 an extension to the database.
2850
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002851- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2852 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2853 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2854 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002855 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002856
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002857- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002858 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002859
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002860- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2861 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2862 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2863 bounded integers.
2864
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002865- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2866 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2867 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2868 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2869 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2870 in existence.
2871
2872 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2873 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2874 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2875 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2876 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2877 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2878
2879 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2880 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2881 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2882 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2883
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002884- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2885 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2886 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2887
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002888- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2889
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002890- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2891 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2892 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2893 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2894
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002895- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2896 argument.
2897
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002898- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2899 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2900 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2901 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2902 [SF patch 560794].
2903
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002904- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2905 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2906 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002907 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2908 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2909 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002910
2911- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2912 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002913
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002914- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2915 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2916 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2917 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002918
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002919- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2920 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2921 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2922 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2923 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2924
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002925- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002926
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002927- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2928
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002929- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2930 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2931 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2932 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2933 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2934 identical to None.
2935
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002936- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2937 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2938 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2939 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2940 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2941 results now.
2942
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002943- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2944 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2945
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002946- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2947 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2948 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2949 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2950 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2951 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2952 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2953 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2954
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002955- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2956
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002957- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2958 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2959
2960- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2961 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2962 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2963 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2964 and other systems.
2965
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002966- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2967 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2968 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2969 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 +00002970 work well with these.
2971
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002972- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2973
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002974- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002975 connections.
2976
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002977- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2978 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2979 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2980
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002981- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2982 sets
2983
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002984- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2985 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2986 name.
2987
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002988- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2989 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2990 passed in.
2991
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002992- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002993 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002994 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2995 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002996
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002997- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2998
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002999- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3000
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003001- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3002 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3003 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3004
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003005- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3006 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3007 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3008 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003009 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003010
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003011- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003012 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003013 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003014
3015- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3016 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3017 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3018
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003019- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003020 the value of its expression argument.
3021
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003022- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3023 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3024 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3025
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003026- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3027 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3028 skipstone browser was included.
3029
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003030- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3031 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3032
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003033Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003034-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003035
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003036- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3037 names in addition to accepting file names.
3038
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003039- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3040 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3041 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3042 still used and useful.)
3043
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003044- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3045 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3046 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3047 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003048
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003049- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3050 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3051 the generated binary.
3052
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003053Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003055
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003056- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3057
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003058- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3059 except in the hands of experts.
3060
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003061- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003062 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3063 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3064 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003065
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003066- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3067 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3068 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3069 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3070 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3071 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3072 builds.
3073
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003074- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3075 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3076 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3077 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3078 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3079 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3080 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3081 new type.
3082
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003083- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003084
3085 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3086 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3087 positive infinities.
3088
3089 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3090 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3091 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3092 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3093 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3094 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3095 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3096
3097 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3098
3099 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3100
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003101- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3102 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3103 size of the executable.
3104
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003105- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3106 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3107 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3108 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003109
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003110- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3111
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003112- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3113 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3114 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003115
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003116- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3117 well as Unix.
3118
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003119- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3120 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3121 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3122 modules in the README file for details.
3123
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003124C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003125-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003126
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003127- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3128 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003129 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003130 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003131 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003132
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003133- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3134 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3135 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3136 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3137 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3138 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003139 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003140 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3141 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3142 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3143 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3144 aligned.)
3145
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003146- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3147 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3148 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3149
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003150- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3151 level.
3152
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003153- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3154 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3155 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3156 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3157 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3158
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003159- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3160 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3161 code.
3162
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003163- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3164 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3165 adjusting for negative indices.
3166
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003167- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3168 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3169 object.
3170
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003171- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3172 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3173 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3174
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003175- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3176 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003177
3178- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3179
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003180- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3181 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3182 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3183 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3184
3185- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3186
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003187- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003188
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003189- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003190 without going through the buffer API.
3191
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003193
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003194- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3195 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3196 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3197 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3198
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003199- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3200 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3201
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003202- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003203 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3204
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003205New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003207
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003208- OpenVMS is now supported.
3209
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003210- AtheOS is now supported.
3211
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003212- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3213
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003214- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3215
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003216Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217-----
3218
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003219- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3220 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3221 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003222
3223Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003224-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003225
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003226- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3227 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3228 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3229 bugs.
3230 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003231 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003232 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3233 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003234 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003235
3236- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003237 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003238
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003239- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3240 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3241
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003242- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3243 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003244 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003245 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3246
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003247- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3248 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3249 use files" uninstall option).
3250
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003251- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3252
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003253- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3254 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3255
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003256- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3257 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3258 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3259
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003260- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3261 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3262 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3263 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3264 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003265 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3266 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3267 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003268
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003269- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003270 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003271 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3272 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3273 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3274 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3275 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3276 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3277 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3278 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3279 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3280 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3281 work around.
3282
3283- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3284 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3285 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3286 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3287 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3288 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3289 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3290 specified with O_CREAT too).
3291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003292Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293----
3294
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003295- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003296
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003297- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3298 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3299 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3300
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003301- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3302 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3303 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3304
3305- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3306 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3307 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3308 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3309 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3310 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3311 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3312 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003313
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003314- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3315 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3316 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003317
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003318- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3319 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3320 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3321 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3322 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003323
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003324- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3325 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3326 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003327
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003328- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3329 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003330
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003331- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3332 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3333 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3334 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3335 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003336
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003337- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3338 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3339 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3340
3341- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3342 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3343 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003344
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003345- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3346 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3347 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3348 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003349 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003350
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003351- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3352 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003353
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003354- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3355 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003356
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003357- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003358 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003359 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3360 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003361
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003362
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003363What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003364===============================
3365
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003366*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3367
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003368Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003369--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003370
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003371- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3372 with a custom metaclass.
3373
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003374Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003376
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003377- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3378 are proxies.
3379
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003380Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003381-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003382
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003383- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3384 very short strings.
3385
3386- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3387 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3388 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3389 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3390 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3391
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003392Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003394
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003395- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3396 close or delete time).
3397
3398- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3399 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3400
3401- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3402
3403- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003404 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003405
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003406Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003408
3409Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003411
3412C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003414
3415New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003417
3418Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003420
3421Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003423
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003424- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3425
3426- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3427 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3428
3429- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3430 deleted at process exit time.
3431
3432- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3433 in backslash.
3434
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003435Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003436----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003437
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003438- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3439 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3440 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3441
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003442
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003443What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003444===========================
3445
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003446*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3447
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003448Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003450
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003451- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3452 been extensively updated. See
3453
3454 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3455
3456 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3457
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003458- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3459 deleted!
3460
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003461- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3462 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3463 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3464 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3465 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3466
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003467- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3468
3469 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3470 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3471
3472 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3473 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3474 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3475 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3476 supported anyway.
3477
3478 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3479 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3480
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003481- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3482 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3483 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3484 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3485 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003486
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003487- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3488 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3489 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3490
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003491Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003492-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003493
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003494- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3495 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3496 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3497 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3498 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3499 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003500 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3501 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3502 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3503 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003504
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003505- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3506 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3507 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3508
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003509Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003511
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003512- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3513
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003514Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003515-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003516
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003517- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3518 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3519 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3520 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3521 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3522 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3523
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003524- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3525
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003526- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3527
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003528- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3529
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003530- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3531 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3532 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3533
3534- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3535
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003536Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003538
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003539- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3540 off a search on Google.
3541
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003542Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003544
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003545- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3546 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3547 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3548 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3549 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3550 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3551 other platforms should do likewise.
3552
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003553- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3554 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3555 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3556
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003557C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003559
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003560- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3561 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3562 producing key-value pairs.
3563
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003564- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003565 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003566 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3567 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3568 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3569 previously went unchallenged.
3570
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003571New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003572-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003573
3574Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003576
3577Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003579
3580Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003582
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003583- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3584 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003585
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003586- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3587 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3588 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3589 home.
3590
3591
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003592What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003593===========================
3594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3596
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003597Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003599
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003600- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3601 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003602
3603 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003604 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003605
3606 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3607 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003608 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003609 This needs to be documented.
3610
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003611- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3612 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3613
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003614- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3615 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3616 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3617
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003618- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3619 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3620
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003621- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3622 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3623 class forbids it).
3624
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003625- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3626 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3627 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3628
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003629- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3630
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003631Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003632-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003633
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003634- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3635 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003636 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003637
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003638- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3639 (like 1 + '').
3640
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003641Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003644- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3645 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3646 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3647 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003648 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003649 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3650
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003651- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3652 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3653 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3654 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3655
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003656- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3657 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003658 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3659 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3660 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003661
3662- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3663 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003664
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003665- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3666 bytes on its input.
3667
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003668Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003670
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003671- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003672 convenience function.
3673
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003674- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3675 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3676 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003677 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3678 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3679 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3680 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3681 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3682 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003683
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003684- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3685 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3686 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3687 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3688
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003689- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3690 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3691 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3692
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003693- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3694 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3695 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3696 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3697
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003698- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3699 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003701 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3702 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3703 new -l and -e options.
3704
3705- statcache is now deprecated.
3706
3707- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3708 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003710 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3711 time properly taken into account.
3712
3713- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3714 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3715 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3716 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3717
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003718Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003719-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003720
3721Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003723
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003724- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3725 is built with libdb3 if available.
3726
3727- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3728
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003729C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003731
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003732- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3733 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3734 PySequence_Size().
3735
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003736- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3737
3738- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3739 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3740 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3741
3742- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3743 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3744
3745- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3746 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3747
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003748New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003750
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003751- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3752 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3753
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003754- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3755 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3756
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003757- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3758
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003759Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003761
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003762- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3763 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3764
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003765Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003767
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003768Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003769----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003770
3771- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3772 removed completely in the next release.
3773
3774- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3775 OSX.
3776
3777- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3778 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3779
3780- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3781
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003782
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003783What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003784===========================
3785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003786*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3787
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003788Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003790
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003791- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003792 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003793 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003794 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3795 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003796 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3797 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003798 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3799 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003800
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003801- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3802 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3803
3804- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3805 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3806
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003807Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003809
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003810- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3811 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3812 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3813 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3814 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3815 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3816 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3817 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3818
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003819- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3820 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3821 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3822 example).
3823
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003824- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003825 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003826 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003827 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003828
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003829- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3830 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3831 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003832 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003833
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003834- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3835 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3836 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3837 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3838 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3839 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3840
3841 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3842
3843 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3844
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003845Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003846-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003847
3848- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3849
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003850- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3851
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003852- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3853 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003854
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003855- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3856 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3857 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3858 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3859 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3860 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003861 attributes.
3862
3863- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3864 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3865 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003866
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003867- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3868 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3869 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003870
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003871- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3872 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3873 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003874 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3875 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3876
3877- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3878 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003879
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003880Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003882
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003883- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3884 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3885
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003886- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3887 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3888 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3889 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3890
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003891- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3892 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3893 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3894 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3895
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003896 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3897 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3898 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3899 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3900 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3901 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3902 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3903 without losing information).
3904
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003905- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003906 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3907 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3908 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3909 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3910 module).
3911
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003912 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003913 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3914 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3915 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3916 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003917
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003918- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003919 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3920 encoding.
3921
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003922- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3923 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3924
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003926 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3927
3928- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3929 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3930 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3931 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3932
3933- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3934
3935- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3936 ON, and OFF.
3937
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003938- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3939 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3940
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003941Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003943
3944- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3945 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3946 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003947
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003948- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3949 been added: -X and -E.
3950
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003951Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003953
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003954- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3955 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3956
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003957C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003959
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003960- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3961 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3962 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3963 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3964 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3965
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003966- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3967 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3968 as long) arguments.
3969
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003970- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3971 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3972 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3973 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3974 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3975 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3976
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003977- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3978 input.
3979
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003980New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003982
3983Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003985
3986Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003988
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003989- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3990 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3991 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3992
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003993- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3994 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3995 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003996 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003997
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3999 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4000 import signal
4001 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004002
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004004 while 1:
4005 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004007 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4008 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4009 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4010 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004011
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004012
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004013What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4014===========================
4015
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004016*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4017
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004018Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004020
4021- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4022 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4023 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4024
4025- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4026 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4027 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4028 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4029 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4030 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4031 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004032
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004033- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004034 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004035 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4036 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4037 associate a docstring with a property.
4038
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004039- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4040 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4041 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4042 other built-in object types.
4043
4044- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4045 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4046 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4047 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4048 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4049
4050- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4051 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4052
4053- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4054 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004055 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004056 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4057 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4058 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4059 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4060 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4061
4062- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4063 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4064 class.
4065
4066- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4067 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4068 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4069 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4070
4071- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4072 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4073 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4074 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4075
4076- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4077 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4078
4079- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4080 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4081 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4082 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4083 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004084 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004085 with the same value as s.
4086
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004087- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4088
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004089Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004090----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004091
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004092- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4093
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004094- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4095 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4096 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4097 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4098 objects.
4099
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004100- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4101 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004102 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4103 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4104
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004105- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4106 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4107 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4108
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004109Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004111
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004112- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4113 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4114 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4115 by the instances.
4116
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004117- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4118 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4119 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4120
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004121- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4122 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4123 before the entire comparison is complete.
4124
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004125- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4126 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4127 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4128
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004129- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4130 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4131 getwriter().
4132
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004133- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4134 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4135
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004136- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004137 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4138 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4139
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004140- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4141 iterable object.
4142
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004143- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4144 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004145
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004146- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4147 authentication.
4148
4149- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4150 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004151
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004152- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004153 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4154 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4155 a sample driver.)
4156
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004157Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004159
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004160- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4161 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4162 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4163 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4164 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4165 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4166 kernel has large file support.
4167
4168- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4169 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4170 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4171 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4172 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4173
4174- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4175 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4176 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4177
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004178C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004180
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004181- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4182 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4183
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004184New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004186
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004187- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4188 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4189
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004190Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004192
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004193- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4194 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4195 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4196 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4197 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4198
4199- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4200 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4201 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4202 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4203
4204- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4205 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4206
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004207Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004209
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004210- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004211 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4212 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004213
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004214
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004215What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4216===========================
4217
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4219
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004220Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004222
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004223- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4224 big to represent as a C double.
4225
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004226- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4227 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4228 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4229 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4230 restriction).
4231
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004232- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4233 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4234 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4235 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4236 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4237
4238 >>> dir([])
4239 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4240 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4241 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4242 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4243 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4244 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4245 'reverse', 'sort']
4246
4247 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4248
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004249- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004250 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4251 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4252 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4253 OverflowError exception.
4254
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004255- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004256 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004257 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4258 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4259 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4260 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4261 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004262 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4264 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4265
4266 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4267 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4268 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4269 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004270
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004271- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004272 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4273 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4274 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4275 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4276 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4277 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4278 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4279 once it is created.
4280
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004281- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4282 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4283 (key, value) pairs.
4284
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004285- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004286 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4287 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4288
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004289- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4290 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4291 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4292 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4293 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004294
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004295- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004296 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4297 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4298
4299 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4300
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004301- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004302 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4303
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004304Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004306
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004307- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004308 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4309 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004310
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004311- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4312 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4313 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4314 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4315 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4316 in this area anymore).
4317
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004318- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4319 threading.Timer.
4320
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004321- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4322 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4323
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004324- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004325 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4326
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004327- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004328 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4329 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4330 converted to Python longs.
4331
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004332- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004333 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4334
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004335- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4336 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4337 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4338
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004339Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004341
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004342- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4343 division operators as per PEP 238.
4344
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004345Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004347
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004348- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4349 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4350 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4351 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4352
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004353C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004355
4356- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004357
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004358- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4359 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004360 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004361
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4363 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004364 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004366
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004367- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004368 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4369 module:
4370
4371 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004372
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004373 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4374 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004375
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004376 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4377 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004378
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004379 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4380
4381 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4382
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004383- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004384 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4385 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4386 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004387
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004388New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004390
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004391- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4392 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4393 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4394 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4395 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004396
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004397Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004399
4400Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004402
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004403- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4404 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4405 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4406 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004407 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4408 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4409 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4410 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4411 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004412
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004413- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004414 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4415
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004416
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004417What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4418===========================
4419
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4421
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004422Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004424
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004425- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4426 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4427
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004428- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4429 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4430 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004431
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004432- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4433 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4434 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4435 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004436
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004437- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4438
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004440
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004441Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004443
4444- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004445 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004446 the module docstring for details.
4447
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004448Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004449-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004450
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004451- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004452 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4453 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4454 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004455
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004456- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4457 Nick Mathewson.
4458
4459Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004461
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004462- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4463 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4464 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4465 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4466 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4467 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4468 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4469 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4470
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004471- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4472 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4473 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4474 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4475
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004476- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4477 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4478 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4479 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4480 come a long way).
4481
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004482- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4483 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4484 write filters for these warnings).
4485
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004486- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4487 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4488 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4489 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4490 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4491
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004492- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4493 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4494 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4495 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4496 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4497 older distribution.
4498
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004499Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004500-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004501
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004502- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4503 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004504 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004505
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004506- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4507 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4508 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4509
4510- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4511
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004512- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4513
4514- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4515
4516- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4517
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004518- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004519
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004520- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4521
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004522New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004524
4525C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004527
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004528- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4529 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4530 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4531 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4532 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4533 against buffer overruns.
4534
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004535- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004536 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4537 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004538 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4539 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4540 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4541
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004542- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4543 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4544 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4545 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4546 deprecated.
4547
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004548Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004550
4551- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4552 relevant is found.
4553
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004554
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004555What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004556===========================
4557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4559
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004560Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004562
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004563- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4564 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4565 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4566 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4567 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4568 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4569 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4570 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004571 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004572 repaired.
4573
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004574- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004575 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004576 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4577 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4578 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4579 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4580 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4581 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4582 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4583 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4584
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004585- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4586 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4587 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4588 leading BMO character).
4589
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004590- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4591 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4592 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4593
4594 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4595 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4596 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004597
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004598 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4599 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4600 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4601 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4602 for various simple to use conversions.
4603
4604 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4605 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4606
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4608 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4609 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4610 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4611 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4612 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4613 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4614 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4615 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4616 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4617 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4618 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4619 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4620 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4621 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004622
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004623- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4624 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4625 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004626 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004627 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004628
4629 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004630 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4631 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4632 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4633 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4634 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004635 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4636 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004637
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004638 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4639 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4640 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004641 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004642
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004643- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4644 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4645 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4646 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4647 floating arithmetic,
4648
4649 x = 9007199254740992.0
4650 print long(x)
4651
4652 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4653 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4654 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4655 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4656 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4657 functions are of good quality).
4658
4659 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4660 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4661 algorithms to break.
4662
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004663- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4664 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4665 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4666 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4667 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4668 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4669 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4670 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4671 order.
4672
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004673- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4674 operation along the most common code paths.
4675
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004676- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4677 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4678
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004679- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4680 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4681 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4682 {}.update(UserDict())
4683
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004684- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4685 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4686 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4687 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4688 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4689 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4690 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4691 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4692
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004693- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004694 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004695
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004696 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004697 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4698 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004699 join() method of strings
4700 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004701 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4702 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004703 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004704 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004705
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004706- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4707 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4708
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004709- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4710 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4711
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004712- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4713 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4714 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4715 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4716
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004717- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4718 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004719 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004720 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4721 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004722
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004723- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4724
4725
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004726Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004727-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004728
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004729- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004730 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004731 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4732 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4733
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004734- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4735 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4736
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004737- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4738 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4739 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4740 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4741
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004742- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4743 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4744 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4745
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004746- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4747
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004748- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4749
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004750- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4751 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4752 that are still imported into string.py).
4753
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004754- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4755
4756- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4757 Now it does.
4758
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004759- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4760
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004761- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4762 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4763 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4764 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4765 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004766 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4767 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004768
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004769- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4770 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4771 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4772 'help(object)'.
4773
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004774Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004776
4777- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004778 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004779 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4780 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4781
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004782- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004783 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4784 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004785
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004786C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004788
4789- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4790 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791
4792----
4793
4794**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**