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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000015- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
16 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
17 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
18
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000019- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
20
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000021- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
22 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
23 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000024
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000025- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
26 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
27
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000028- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
29
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000030- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
31 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
32
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000033- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
34
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000035- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
36
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000037- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
38 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
39
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000040- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
41 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
42 Fixes bug #858016 .
43
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000044- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
45 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
46 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
47
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000048- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
49 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
50 improves their performance (about 35%).
51
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000052- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
53 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
54 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
55
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000056- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
57 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
58 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
59 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
60
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000061- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
62 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
63 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
64 length is not known).
65
66- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
67 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000068 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
69 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000070 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
71
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000072- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
73 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
74
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000075- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
76 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
77 keyword arguments.
78
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000079- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
80 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
81 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
82
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000083- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
84 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
85 cases.
86
87- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
88 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
89 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
90 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
91 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
92 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
93 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
94 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
95 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
96 a release build.
97
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000098- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
99 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
100
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000101- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000102 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000103
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000104- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
105 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
106 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
107 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
108 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
109 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
110 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
111 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
112 destroyed.
113
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000114- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
115 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
116 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
117 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
118 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
119 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
120 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
121 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
122
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000123- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
124 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
125 character other than a space.
126
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000127- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
128 by the function object or by the method object, the function
129 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
130 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
131 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
132 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
133 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
134 attributes with the same name.
135
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000136- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
137 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
138 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
139 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
140 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
141 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
142 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
143 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
144 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
145 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
146 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
147 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
148 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
149 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000150
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000151- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
152 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
153 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
154 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
155 This has been repaired.
156
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000157- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
158
159- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
160
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000161- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
162 over a sequence.
163
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000164- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000165 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000166
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000167- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
168
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000169- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
170 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
171 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
172 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
173 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
174 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
175 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
176 records with equal keys is unchanged).
177
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000178- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
179 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
180 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
181
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000182- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
183 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
184 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
185 freelist.
186
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000187- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
188 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
189
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000190- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
191 number.
192
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000193- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
194 a TypeError exception.
195
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000196- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
197 820195.
198
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000199- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
200 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
201 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
202
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000203- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
204 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
205 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000206
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000207- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
208 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
209 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
210
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000211- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
212 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000213 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000214
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000215- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000216 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
217 the first call.
218
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000219
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000220Extension modules
221-----------------
222
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000223- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
224
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000225- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
226
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000227- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
228 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
229
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000230- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
231 fewer false positives.
232
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000233- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
234 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
235
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000236- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
237 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
238
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000239- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
240 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000241 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
242 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
243 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000244
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000245- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
246 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
247 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
248 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
249
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000250- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
251 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
252 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
253 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
254 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
255 #897625.
256
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000257- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
258 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
259
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000260- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
261 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
262 and pops on either side of the deque.
263
264- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
265 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
266
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000267- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
268 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
269 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
270 other functions that expect a function argument.
271
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000272- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
273
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000274- os.getsid was added.
275
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000276- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
277 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
278 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
279
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000280- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
281
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000282- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
283
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000284- readline.clear_history was added.
285
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000286- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
287
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000288- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
289
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000290- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
291
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000292- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
293
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000294- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
295
296- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
297
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000298- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
299
300- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
301
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000302- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
303 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
304 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
305
306- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
307 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
308 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
309 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
310 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
311 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
312 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
313
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000314- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
315 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
316 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
317 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000318
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000319- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
320 iterators from a single iterable.
321
322- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
323 of raising a TypeError exception.
324
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000325- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
326 as parameter.
327
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000328Library
329-------
330
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000331- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
332 on cygwin and mingw32.
333
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000334- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
335
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000336- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
337 module.
338
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000339- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
340
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000341- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
342 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
343 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
344
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000345- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
346 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
347 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
348
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000349- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
350
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000351- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
352
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000353- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
354 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
355
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000356- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
357 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
358 type pattern with the same value exists.
359
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000360- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
361 when run from the command prompt).
362
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000363- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
364 not taken into consideration when caching value.
365
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000366- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
367 default sort).
368
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000369- Added global runctx function to profile module
370
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000371- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
372
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000373- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
374
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000375- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
376
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000377- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
378 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
379 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
380 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
381 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
382 accordingly.
383
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000384- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
385 decoding standards.
386
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000387- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
388 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
389 called for all requests.
390
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000391- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
392 they are passed to the compiler.
393
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000394- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
395 indent, width and depth.
396
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000397- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
398 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
399
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000400- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
401 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
402
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000403- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
404
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000405- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
406
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000407- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
408
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000409- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
410 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
411
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000412- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
413 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000414
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000415- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
416 a string).
417
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000418- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
419
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000420- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
421
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000422- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
423
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000424- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
425
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000426- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
427 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
428 list of fieldnames.
429
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000430- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
431 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
432
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000433- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
434
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000435- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
436 empty lists.
437
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000438- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
439 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
440 and shelves.
441
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000442- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
443 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
444
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000445- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000446 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
447 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000448
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000449- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
450 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000451 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000452
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000453- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000454 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
455 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
456
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000457- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
458 and removed in Py2.4.
459
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000460- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
461
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000462- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
463
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000464Tools/Demos
465-----------
466
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000467- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
468 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
469
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000470- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
471
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000472- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
473 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
474 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
475 destination in situations where both files are given.
476
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000477- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
478 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
479 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
480 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
481
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000482- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
483
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000484- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
485 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
486 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
487 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
488 now.
489
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000490- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
491 in effect
492
493- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
494 C-c C-h
495
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000496- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
497 -d option was given.
498
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000499Build
500-----
501
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000502- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
503 on AMD64.
504
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000505- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
506 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
507
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000508- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
509 removed.
510
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000511- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
512 supported (see PEP 11).
513
514- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
515
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000516- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
517
518- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
519 (see PEP 11).
520
521- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
522 sizeof(char) must be 1.
523
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000524C API
525-----
526
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000527- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
528 generator objects.
529
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000530- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
531 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000532 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
533 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000534
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000535- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
536 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
537
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000538- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
539 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
540 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
541 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
542 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
543
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000544- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
545 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
546 about 10% faster.
547
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000548- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
549 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
550
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000551- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
552 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
553 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
554 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
555
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000556New platforms
557-------------
558
559Tests
560-----
561
562Windows
563-------
564
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000565- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
566 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
567 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
568 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
569
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000570- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
571 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
572 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
573
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000574Mac
575----
576
577
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000578What's New in Python 2.3 final?
579===============================
580
581*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
582
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000583IDLE
584----
585
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000586- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
587 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
588 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
589 context-menu actions.
590
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000591- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
592 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
593 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
594 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
595 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
596 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
597 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
598 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
599 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
600
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000601
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000602What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
603=============================================
604
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000605*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000606
607Core and builtins
608-----------------
609
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000610- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000611 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000612 comment at the end are still unsupported.
613
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000614Extension modules
615-----------------
616
617- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
618 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
619 than once. This has been fixed.
620
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000621- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
622 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
623 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
624 call.
625
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000626- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
627
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000628Library
629-------
630
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000631- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
632 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
633
634- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
635 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
636 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
637 restored.
638
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000639IDLE
640----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000641
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000642- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000643
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000644Build
645-----
646
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000647- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
648 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
649
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000650C API
651-----
652
653Windows
654-------
655
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000656- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
657 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
658
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000659- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
660
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000661Mac
662---
663
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000664- Various fixes to pimp.
665
666- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
667
668- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
669 more problems than it solves.
670
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000671
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000672What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
673=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000674
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000675*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
676
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000677Core and builtins
678-----------------
679
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000680- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
681 by sys.setcheckinterval().
682
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000683- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
684 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000685 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000686
687- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
688 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
689 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000690 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000691
692- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
693 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000694
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000695- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
696 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
697 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
698
699- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000700 770247.
701
702- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000703
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000704Extension modules
705-----------------
706
707- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
708 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
709
710- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
711
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000712- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
713
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000714- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
715 contained within the _strptime module.
716
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000717- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
718 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
719
720- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000721 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
722
723- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
724 the find_class attribute, if present.
725
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000726- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000727
728 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
729 (SF bug 763298).
730
731 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000732 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
733 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
734 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000735
736 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
737
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000738Library
739-------
740
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000741- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
742
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000743- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
744 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
745 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
746 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
747 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
748 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
749 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
750 or Tester().
751
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000752- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
753 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
754 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
755 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
756 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
757 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
758 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
759 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
760 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000761
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000762 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000763
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000764- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
765 weren't before was an oversight.
766
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000767- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
768 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
769
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000770- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
771 when there are no lines.
772
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000773- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
774 which could occur with Tk 8.4
775
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000776- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
777 to child processes.
778
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000779- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
780
781- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
782
783- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
784 xmlrpclib.
785
786- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
787 responses.
788
789- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
790 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
791
792- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
793 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
794 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
795
796- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
797 used as patterns.
798
799- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
800 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
801 than Tk 8.3.
802
803- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
804
805- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000806
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000807Tools/Demos
808-----------
809
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000810- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
811
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000812- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
813
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000814- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000815
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000816Build
817-----
818
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000819- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
820
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000821- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
822
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000823- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
824 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000825
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000826- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
827 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
828 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000829
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000830C API
831-----
832
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000833- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
834 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
835
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000836Windows
837-------
838
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000839- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
840 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
841 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
842 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
843 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
844 Python exception ::
845
846 thread.error: can't start new thread
847
848 is raised now.
849
850- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
851 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
852 instead of from DLL teardown.
853
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000854Mac
855---
856
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000857- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000858 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000859 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
860 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
861 the executable in the bundle.
862
863- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000864
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000865- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
866
867- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
868 on Panther.
869
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000870What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
871================================
872
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000873*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000874
875Core and builtins
876-----------------
877
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000878- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
879 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
880 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
881 with the -i option.
882
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000883- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
884 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
885
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000886- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
887 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
888
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000889- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
890 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
891 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
892 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
893 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
894 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
895 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
896 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
897 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
898 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
899 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
900 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
901 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000902
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000903- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
904 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
905 embedded in a lambda expression.
906
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000907- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
908 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
909 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
910 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
911 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
912
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000913- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
914 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
915 matches the restriction on classic classes.
916
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000917- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
918 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
919
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000920- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
921 It's writable again.
922
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000923- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
924 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
925 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000926 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000927
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000928- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
929 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
930 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
931
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000932Extension modules
933-----------------
934
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000935- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
936 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
937
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000938- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
939 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
940 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
941 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
942
943- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
944 collection.
945
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000946- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
947 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
948 unique within a single program run.
949
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000950- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
951 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
952
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000953- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
954 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
955
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000956- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
957 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000958
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000959- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
960
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000961- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
962 Fixes SF bug #730685.
963
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000964- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
965 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
966 for many BSD-derived systems.
967
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000968
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000969Library
970-------
971
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000972- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
973 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
974 primary ones:
975
976 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
977 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
978 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
979
980 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
981 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
982 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
983 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
984 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
985 framework features (which doctest lacks).
986
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000987- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
988 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
989 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
990 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
991 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
992 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
993 argument.
994
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000995- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
996 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
997 in the archive.
998
999- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1000 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1001
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001002- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1003 569574).
1004
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001005- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1006 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1007 no more.
1008
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001009- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1010 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1011 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1012 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1013 code coverage.
1014
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001015- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1016 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1017 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001018 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1019 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001020
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001021- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1022 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1023 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001024 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001025
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001026- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1027
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001028- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1029 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1030 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1031 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1032
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001033- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1034 handling.
1035
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001036- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1037 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1038
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001039- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1040 in socket.py.
1041
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001042- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1043
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001044- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1045 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1046 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1047 opener with proxy support.
1048
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001049- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1050
1051- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1052
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001053Tools/Demos
1054-----------
1055
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001056- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1057
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001058- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1059
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001060- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1061 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001062
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001063- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1064 files.
1065
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001066Build
1067-----
1068
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001069- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001070 different root directory.
1071
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001072C API
1073-----
1074
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001075- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1076 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1077 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1078 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1079 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1080 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1081 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1082 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1083 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1084 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1085
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001086- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1087 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1088 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1089 from Python.
1090
1091
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001092New platforms
1093-------------
1094
1095None this time.
1096
1097Tests
1098-----
1099
1100- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1101 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1102
1103Windows
1104-------
1105
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001106- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1107
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001108- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1109 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1110 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1111 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1112 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1113 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1114 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1115 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1116 that's what it's for.
1117
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001118Mac
1119---
1120
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001121- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1122 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1123 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1124 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001125- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1126 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1127- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001128
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001129SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1130------------------------------------
1131
1132430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1133598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1134622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1135661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1136683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1137697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1138713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1139724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1140727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1141729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1142730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1143731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1144732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1145733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1146735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1147740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1148744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1149745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1150747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1151749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1152751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1153753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1154755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1155757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1156760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1157
1158
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001159What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1160================================
1161
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001162*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001163
1164Core and builtins
1165-----------------
1166
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001167- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1168 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1169
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001170- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1171 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1172 and cannot be strings).
1173
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001174- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1175 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1176 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1177 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1178
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001179- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1180 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1181 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1182 Python itself.
1183
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001184- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1185 the referenced object, if it has one.
1186
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001187- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1188 the thread started at
1189 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1190
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001191- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1192 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1193 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1194 placed on a list index.
1195
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001196- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1197 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1198 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1199 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1200
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001201- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1202 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1203 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1204 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1205 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1206 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1207 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1208
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001209- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1210 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1211 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1212 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1213 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1214
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001215- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1216 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001217
1218- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1219 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1220 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1221 #693195.)
1222
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001223- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1224 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001225
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001226- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001227 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001228 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1229 interpreter executions, would fail.
1230
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001231- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001232 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001233 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001234
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001235Extension modules
1236-----------------
1237
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001238- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1239 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1240 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1241 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1242
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001243- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1244 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1245
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001246- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1247 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1248 and Greg Chapman.)
1249
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001250- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1251 recursively.
1252
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001253- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001254 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1255 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1256 leaks.
1257
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001258- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1259
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001260- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1261 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1262 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1263 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1264 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1265 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1266 #705836.
1267
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001268- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001269 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1270
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001271- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1272 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1273 See SF bug #692416.
1274
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001275- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1276 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1277
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001278- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1279 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1280 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001281
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001282- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001283 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1284 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1285
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001286- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1287 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1288 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1289 timeouts to work properly.
1290
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001291Library
1292-------
1293
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001294- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1295 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1296 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1297 future release.
1298
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001299- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1300 for querying platform dependent features.
1301
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001302- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001303
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001304- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1305 pickle protocol versions.
1306
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001307- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1308 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1309 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1310
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001311- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1312
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001313- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1314 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1315 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1316 modules.
1317
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001318- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1319 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1320 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1321
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001322- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1323 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1324
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001325- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1326 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1327 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1328
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001329- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001330 MS Office extensions.
1331
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001332- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1333 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1334
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001335- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1336 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1337
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001338- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1339 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1340 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1341 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1342 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1343 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1344
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001345- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1346 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1347 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001348
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001349- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1350 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1351 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1352
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001353- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1354
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001355- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1356 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1357 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1358
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001359Tools/Demos
1360-----------
1361
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001362- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1363 See the module docstring for details.
1364
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001365Build
1366-----
1367
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001368- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1369 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001370
1371C API
1372-----
1373
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001374- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1375
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001376- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1377 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1378 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1379
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001380- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1381 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001382
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001383 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1384 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1385 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001386
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001387- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001388 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1389
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001390- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1391 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1392 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001393
1394New platforms
1395-------------
1396
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001397None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001398
1399Tests
1400-----
1401
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001402- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1403 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001404
1405Windows
1406-------
1407
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001408- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1409 function.
1410
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001411- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1412 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001413
1414Mac
1415---
1416
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001417- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1418 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001419
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001420- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1421 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001422
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001423- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1424 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1425 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001426
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001427- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001428 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1429 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001430
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001431- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1432 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001433
1434
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001435What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1436=================================
1437
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001438*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001439
1440Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001441-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001442
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001443- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1444 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1445 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1446
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001447- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1448 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1449 (SF patch #664376.)
1450
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001451- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1452 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1453 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1454 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1455 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1456 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001457 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001458
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001459- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1460 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1461 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1462 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001463 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001464
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001465- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1466 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1467 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1468 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1469 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1470 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1471 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1472 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1473 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1474 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1475 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1476
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001477- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1478 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1479 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1480 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1481 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1482 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1483
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001484- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1485 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1486
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001487- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1488 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1489 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1490 case.)
1491
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001492- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1493 passed as unicode strings.
1494
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001495- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1496 See SF bug #683467.
1497
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001498- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1499 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1500
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001501- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1502
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001503- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1504
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001505- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1506 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1507 arguments.
1508
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001509- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1510 See SF bug #667147.
1511
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001512- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001513 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001514 See SF bug #676155.
1515
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001516- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001517 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001518 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1519 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1520 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1521 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1522 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1523 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001524
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001525Extension modules
1526-----------------
1527
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001528- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1529 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1530 tp_as_number pointer.
1531
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001532- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1533 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1534 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1535 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1536 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1537
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001538- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1539
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001540- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1541
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001542- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001543 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001544 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1545 patch #678531.)
1546
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001547- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1548 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1549
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001550- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1551 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1552
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001553- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1554
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001555- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1556 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1557 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1558
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001559- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1560
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001561- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1562 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1563
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001564- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001565
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001566- datetime changes:
1567
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001568 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1569
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001570 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1571 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1572 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1573 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1574 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1575 now.
1576
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001577 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001578 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1579 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001580
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001581 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001582 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001583 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1584 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1585 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1586 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001587
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001588 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1589 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1590 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001591 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1592
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001593 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1594 by a later example coded by Guido.
1595
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001596 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001597 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1598 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1599 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001600 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1601 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1602
1603 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1604 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1605 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1606 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1607 tzinfo subclass instance.
1608
1609 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1610 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1611 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1612 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1613 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1614 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1615 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1616 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001617
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001618 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1619 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1620 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1621 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1622 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001623 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1624
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001625 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001626
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001627 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1628 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1629 as a naive datetime object.
1630
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001631 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1632 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1633 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1634
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001635 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1636 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1637 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1638 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1639 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1640 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1641 comparison.
1642
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001643 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1644 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1645 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1646 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001647 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001648
1649 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001650
1651 and ::
1652
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001653 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1654
1655 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1656 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1657 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1658 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1659
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001660 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1661 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1662 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1663 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1664 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1665
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001666 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1667 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001668 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1669 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001670
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001671Library
1672-------
1673
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001674- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1675 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1676
1677- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1678 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1679 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1680 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1681 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1682 See PEP 307 for details.
1683
1684- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1685 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1686
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001687- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1688 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001689 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001690 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1691 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001692 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001693
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001694- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1695 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1696
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001697- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1698 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1699 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1700
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001701- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1702
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001703- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1704 exception.
1705
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001706- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1707 class.
1708
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001709- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1710 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1711 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1712
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001713- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1714 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1715
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001716- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001717 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1718 See SF bug #659228.
1719
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001720- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1721 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1722 See SF patch #651082.
1723
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001724- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001725
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001726- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1727 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1728
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001729- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001730 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001731
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001732- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1733 DOS paths from other platforms.
1734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001735Tools/Demos
1736-----------
1737
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001738- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1739 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1740 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1741 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1742 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1743 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1744 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1745 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1746 example:
1747
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001748 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1749 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001750
1751 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1752
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001753
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001754Build
1755-----
1756
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001757- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1758 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1759 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001760 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1761
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001762 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1763
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001764- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1765 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1766 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1767 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1768 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1769 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1770 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1771 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1772 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1773
1774- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1775 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1776 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1777 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1778
1779- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1780 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1781
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001782C API
1783-----
1784
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001785- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1786 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001787
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001788- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1789 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1790 tp_as_number pointer.
1791
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001792- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1793 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1794 (SF #681367)
1795
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001796- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1797 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1798 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1799 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001800
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001801Tests
1802-----
1803
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001804- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001805 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1806 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1807 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1808 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1809 pydoc.)
1810
1811- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1812
1813- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001814
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001815Windows
1816-------
1817
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001818- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1819 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1820 time).
1821
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001822- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1823 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1824
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001825- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1826 release without strong cryptography.
1827
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001828- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001829 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001830
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001831- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1832 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1833
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001834Mac
1835---
1836
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001837- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1838 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001839
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001840- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1841 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1842 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001843
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001844- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1845 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001846
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001847- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1848 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1849 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1850 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001851
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001852- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001853 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1854 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1855 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001856
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001857
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001858What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001859=================================
1860
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001861*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001863Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001864--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001865
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001866- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1867
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001868- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1869 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001870 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001871 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001872 a different meaning than before.
1873
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001874- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001875 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001876 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001877
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001878- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001879 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001880 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001881
1882- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1883 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1884 and deallocation.
1885
1886- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1887 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1888
1889- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1890 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1891 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1892 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1893 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1894
1895- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1896 now detected by the garbage collector.
1897
1898- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1899 [SF bug 519621]
1900
1901- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1902 identifier.
1903
1904- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1905 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1906 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1907 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1908 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1909 [SF bug 563060]
1910
1911- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1912 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1913 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1914 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1915 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1916
1917- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1918 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1919 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1920
1921- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1922
1923- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1924 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1925 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1926 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1927 state of the slots would be lost.)
1928
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001929Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001930-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001931
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001932- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001933 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1934 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1935 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1936 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001937 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1938 Jython 2.1.
1939
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001940- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001941 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001942 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1943 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1944 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1945 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1946 these, see PEP 302.
1947
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001948- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1949 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1950 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1951
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001952- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1953 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1954 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1955
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001956- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1957 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1958 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1959
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001960- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1961 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1962 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1963 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1964 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1965 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1966 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1967 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1968 releases or implementations.
1969
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001970- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001971 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1972 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001973
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001974- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1975 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1976
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001977- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1978 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1979 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1980
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001981- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1982 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1983
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001984- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1985 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001986 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1987 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001988
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001989- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1990 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1991 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1992 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1993 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1994
1995 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1996 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1997 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1998 pattern.
1999
2000 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2001 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2002 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2003 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2004
2005 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2006 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2007 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2008 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2009 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2010 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2011
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002012- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2013 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2014 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2015 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2016 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2017 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2018 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2019 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002020
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002021- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2022 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2023 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2024 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2025 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002026 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2027 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2028 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2029 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2030 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2031 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2032 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002033
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002034- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2035 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2036
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002037- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2038 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2039 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2040 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2041 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2042 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2043 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2044 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2045 to Zack Weinberg!
2046
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002047- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2048 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2049 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2050 type. This has been fixed now.
2051
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002052- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2053 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2054 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2055
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002056- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2057 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2058 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2059 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2060 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2061 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2062 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2063 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002064 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002065
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002066- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2067 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2068 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002069
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002070- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2071 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2072 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2073 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2074 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2075 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2076 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2077 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002078 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002079 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2080 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2081
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002082- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2083 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2084 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2085 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2086 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2087 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2088 this.)
2089
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002090- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2091 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002092 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002093 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002094 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2095 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002096 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2097 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002098
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002099- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2100 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2101 currently running.
2102
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002103- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2104 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2105 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2106 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2107
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002108- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2109 as directory names.
2110
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002111- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2112 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2113
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002114- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2115 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2116
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002117- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002118 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2119 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002120
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002121- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2122 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2123 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2124 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2125 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2126
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002127- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2128 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2129 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2130 removed.
2131
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002132- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2133 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2134 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2135
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002136- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2137 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2138 to __debug__.
2139
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002140- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2141 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2142 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2143
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002144- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2145 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2146 deprecated now.
2147
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002148- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2149 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2150 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002151
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002152- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2153 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2154 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2155 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2156 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002157
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002158- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2159 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2160
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002161- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2162 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2163 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002164 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002165 is backward compatible.
2166
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002167- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2168 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2169 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2170 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2171 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2172
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002173- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2174 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2175 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2176 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2177 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2178 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002179
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002180- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2181 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2182
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002183- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2184 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2185
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002186- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2187 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2188 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2189 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2190 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2191
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002192- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2193 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2194 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2195
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002196- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002197 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2198
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002199- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2200 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2201 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002202
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002203- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2204 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2205
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002206- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2207 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2208 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2209
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002210- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2211
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002212Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002213-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002214
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002215- Added three operators to the operator module:
2216 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2217 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2218 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2219
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002220- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2221
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002222- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2223 archives.
2224
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002225- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2226 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2227 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2228
2229 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2230
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002231- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2232 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2233 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002234 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002235
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002236- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2237 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2238 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2239 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002240 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2241 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2242 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2243 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002244
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002245- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2246 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002247
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002248- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2249
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002250- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2251 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2252
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002253- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2254 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2255 supported.
2256
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002257- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2258
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002259- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2260 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002261
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002262- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2263 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2264
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002265- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2266
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002267- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2268 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2269
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002270- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2271 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2272 functions but callable type objects.
2273
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002274- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002275 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002276 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002277
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002278- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2279 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002280
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002281- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2282 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002283
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002284- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2285 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2286 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2287 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2288
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002289- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2290 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002291
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002292- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2293 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2294 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2295 and __imul__.
2296
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002297- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002298 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2299 is called.
2300
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002301- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2302 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2303 interpreter was compiled.
2304
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002305- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2306 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2307 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002308 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002309 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2310 1, not 2.
2311
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002312- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2313 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2314 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2315 limit.
2316
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002317- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2318 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2319 bug #623464.
2320
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002321- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2322 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2323 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2324 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002326Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002328
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002329- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2330
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002331- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2332 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2333 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2334 with Python 2.3a2.
2335
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002336- os.path exposes getctime.
2337
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002338- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002339 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002340 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002341 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002342 unit tests of floating point results.
2343
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002344- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2345 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2346 has been increased.
2347
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002348- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2349 executed.
2350
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002351- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2352 postinstallation script.
2353
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002354- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2355 test the current module.
2356
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002357- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002358 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2359 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2360 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2361 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2362
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002363- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002364 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002365 Ward's Optik package.
2366
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002367- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2368 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2369 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2370 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2371
2372- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2373 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002374 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002375
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002376- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2377 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2378 shelf are binary pickles.
2379
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002380- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2381 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2382
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002383- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2384 modules are iterators now.
2385
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002386- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2387 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2388 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2389 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2390 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2391 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002392
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002393- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2394 with their entity value.
2395
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002396- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2397
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002398- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2399 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002400
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002401- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2402 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002403 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002404
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002405- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2406 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2407 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2408 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2409 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2410 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2411 main():
2412
2413 import locale
2414 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2415
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002416- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2417 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2418
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002419- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2420 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2421 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2422 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2423 to the new standard.
2424
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002425- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2426 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2427 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2428 an extension to the database.
2429
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002430- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2431 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2432 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2433 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002434 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002435
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002436- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002437 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002438
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002439- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2440 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2441 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2442 bounded integers.
2443
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002444- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2445 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2446 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2447 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2448 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2449 in existence.
2450
2451 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2452 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2453 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2454 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2455 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2456 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2457
2458 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2459 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2460 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2461 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2462
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002463- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2464 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2465 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2466
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002467- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2468
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002469- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2470 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2471 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2472 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2473
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002474- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2475 argument.
2476
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002477- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2478 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2479 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2480 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2481 [SF patch 560794].
2482
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002483- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2484 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2485 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002486 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2487 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2488 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002489
2490- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2491 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002492
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002493- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2494 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2495 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2496 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002497
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002498- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2499 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2500 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2501 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2502 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2503
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002504- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002505
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002506- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2507
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002508- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2509 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2510 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2511 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2512 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2513 identical to None.
2514
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002515- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2516 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2517 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2518 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2519 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2520 results now.
2521
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002522- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2523 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2524
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002525- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2526 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2527 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2528 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2529 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2530 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2531 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2532 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2533
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002534- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2535
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002536- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2537 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2538
2539- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2540 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2541 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2542 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2543 and other systems.
2544
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002545- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2546 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2547 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2548 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 +00002549 work well with these.
2550
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002551- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2552
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002553- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002554 connections.
2555
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002556- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2557 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2558 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2559
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002560- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2561 sets
2562
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002563- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2564 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2565 name.
2566
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002567- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2568 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2569 passed in.
2570
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002571- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002572 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002573 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2574 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002575
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002576- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2577
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002578- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2579
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002580- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2581 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2582 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2583
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002584- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2585 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2586 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2587 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002588 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002589
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002590- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002591 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002592 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002593
2594- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2595 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2596 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2597
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002598- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002599 the value of its expression argument.
2600
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002601- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2602 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2603 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2604
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002605- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2606 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2607 skipstone browser was included.
2608
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002609- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2610 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2611
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002612Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002613-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002614
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002615- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2616 names in addition to accepting file names.
2617
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002618- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2619 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2620 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2621 still used and useful.)
2622
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002623- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2624 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2625 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2626 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002627
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002628- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2629 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2630 the generated binary.
2631
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002632Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002633-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002634
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002635- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2636
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002637- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2638 except in the hands of experts.
2639
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002640- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002641 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2642 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2643 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002644
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002645- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2646 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2647 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2648 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2649 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2650 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2651 builds.
2652
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002653- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2654 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2655 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2656 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2657 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2658 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2659 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2660 new type.
2661
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002662- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002663
2664 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2665 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2666 positive infinities.
2667
2668 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2669 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2670 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2671 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2672 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2673 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2674 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2675
2676 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2677
2678 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2679
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002680- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2681 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2682 size of the executable.
2683
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002684- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2685 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2686 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2687 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002688
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002689- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2690
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002691- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2692 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2693 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002694
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002695- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2696 well as Unix.
2697
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002698- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2699 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2700 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2701 modules in the README file for details.
2702
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002703C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002704-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002705
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002706- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2707 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002708 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002709 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002710 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002711
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002712- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2713 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2714 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2715 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2716 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2717 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002718 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002719 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2720 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2721 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2722 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2723 aligned.)
2724
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002725- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2726 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2727 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2728
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002729- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2730 level.
2731
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002732- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2733 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2734 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2735 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2736 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2737
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002738- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2739 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2740 code.
2741
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002742- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2743 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2744 adjusting for negative indices.
2745
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002746- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2747 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2748 object.
2749
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002750- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2751 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2752 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2753
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002754- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2755 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002756
2757- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2758
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002759- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2760 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2761 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2762 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2763
2764- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2765
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002766- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002767
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002768- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002769 without going through the buffer API.
2770
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002771- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002772
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002773- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2774 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2775 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2776 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2777
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002778- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2779 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2780
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002781- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002782 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2783
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002784New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002786
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002787- OpenVMS is now supported.
2788
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002789- AtheOS is now supported.
2790
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002791- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2792
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002793- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2794
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002795Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002796-----
2797
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002798- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2799 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2800 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002801
2802Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002803-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002804
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002805- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2806 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2807 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2808 bugs.
2809 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002810 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002811 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2812 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002813 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002814
2815- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002816 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002817
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002818- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2819 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2820
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002821- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2822 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002823 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002824 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2825
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002826- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2827 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2828 use files" uninstall option).
2829
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002830- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2831
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002832- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2833 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2834
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002835- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2836 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2837 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2838
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002839- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2840 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2841 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2842 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2843 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002844 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2845 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2846 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002847
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002848- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002849 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002850 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2851 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2852 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2853 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2854 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2855 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2856 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2857 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2858 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2859 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2860 work around.
2861
2862- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2863 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2864 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2865 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2866 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2867 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2868 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2869 specified with O_CREAT too).
2870
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002871Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002872----
2873
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002874- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002875
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002876- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2877 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2878 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002880- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2881 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2882 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2883
2884- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2885 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2886 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2887 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2888 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2889 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2890 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2891 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002892
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002893- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2894 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2895 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002896
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002897- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2898 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2899 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2900 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2901 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002902
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002903- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2904 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2905 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002906
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002907- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2908 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002909
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002910- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2911 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2912 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2913 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2914 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002916- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2917 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2918 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2919
2920- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2921 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2922 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002923
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002924- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2925 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2926 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2927 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002928 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002929
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002930- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2931 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002932
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002933- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2934 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002935
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002936- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002937 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002938 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2939 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002940
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002941
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002942What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002943===============================
2944
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2946
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002947Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002948--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002949
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002950- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2951 with a custom metaclass.
2952
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002953Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002955
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002956- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2957 are proxies.
2958
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002959Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002960-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002961
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002962- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2963 very short strings.
2964
2965- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2966 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2967 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2968 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2969 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2970
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002971Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002973
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002974- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2975 close or delete time).
2976
2977- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2978 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2979
2980- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2981
2982- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002983 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002984
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002985Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002986-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002987
2988Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002990
2991C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002993
2994New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002996
2997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002999
3000Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003002
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003003- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3004
3005- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3006 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3007
3008- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3009 deleted at process exit time.
3010
3011- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3012 in backslash.
3013
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003014Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003015----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003016
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003017- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3018 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3019 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3020
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003021
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003022What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003023===========================
3024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3026
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003027Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003029
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003030- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3031 been extensively updated. See
3032
3033 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3034
3035 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3036
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003037- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3038 deleted!
3039
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003040- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3041 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3042 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3043 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3044 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3045
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003046- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3047
3048 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3049 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3050
3051 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3052 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3053 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3054 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3055 supported anyway.
3056
3057 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3058 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3059
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003060- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3061 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3062 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3063 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3064 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003065
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003066- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3067 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3068 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3069
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003070Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003072
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003073- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3074 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3075 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3076 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3077 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3078 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003079 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3080 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3081 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3082 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003083
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003084- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3085 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3086 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3087
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003088Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003090
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003091- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3092
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003095
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003096- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3097 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3098 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3099 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3100 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3101 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3102
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003103- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3104
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003105- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3106
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003107- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3108
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003109- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3110 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3111 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3112
3113- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3114
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003115Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003117
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003118- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3119 off a search on Google.
3120
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003121Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003122-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003123
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003124- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3125 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3126 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3127 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3128 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3129 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3130 other platforms should do likewise.
3131
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003132- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3133 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3134 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3135
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003136C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003138
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003139- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3140 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3141 producing key-value pairs.
3142
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003143- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003144 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003145 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3146 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3147 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3148 previously went unchallenged.
3149
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003150New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003151-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003152
3153Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003155
3156Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003158
3159Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003161
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003162- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3163 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003164
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003165- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3166 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3167 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3168 home.
3169
3170
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003171What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003172===========================
3173
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003174*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3175
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003176Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003178
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003179- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3180 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003181
3182 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003183 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003184
3185 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3186 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003187 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003188 This needs to be documented.
3189
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003190- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3191 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3192
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003193- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3194 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3195 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3196
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003197- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3198 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3199
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003200- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3201 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3202 class forbids it).
3203
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003204- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3205 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3206 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3207
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003208- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3209
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003210Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003211-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003212
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003213- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3214 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003215 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003216
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003217- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3218 (like 1 + '').
3219
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003220Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003221-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003222
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003223- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3224 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3225 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3226 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003227 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003228 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3229
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003230- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3231 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3232 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3233 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3234
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003235- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3236 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003237 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3238 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3239 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003240
3241- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3242 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003243
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003244- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3245 bytes on its input.
3246
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003247Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003248-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003249
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003250- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003251 convenience function.
3252
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003253- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3254 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3255 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003256 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3257 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3258 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3259 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3260 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3261 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003262
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003263- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3264 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3265 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3266 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3267
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003268- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3269 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3270 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3271
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003272- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3273 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3274 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3275 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3276
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003277- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3278 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003280 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3281 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3282 new -l and -e options.
3283
3284- statcache is now deprecated.
3285
3286- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3287 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003289 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3290 time properly taken into account.
3291
3292- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3293 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3294 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3295 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003297Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003299
3300Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003301-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003302
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003303- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3304 is built with libdb3 if available.
3305
3306- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3307
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003308C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003310
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003311- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3312 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3313 PySequence_Size().
3314
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003315- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3316
3317- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3318 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3319 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3320
3321- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3322 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3323
3324- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3325 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003327New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003329
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003330- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3331 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3332
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003333- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3334 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3335
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003336- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3337
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003338Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003340
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003341- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3342 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3343
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003344Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003345-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003346
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003347Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003349
3350- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3351 removed completely in the next release.
3352
3353- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3354 OSX.
3355
3356- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3357 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3358
3359- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3360
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003361
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003362What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003363===========================
3364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3366
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003367Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003368--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003369
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003370- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003371 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003372 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003373 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3374 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003375 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3376 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003377 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3378 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003379
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003380- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3381 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3382
3383- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3384 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3385
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003386Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003387-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003388
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003389- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3390 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3391 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3392 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3393 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3394 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3395 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3396 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3397
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003398- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3399 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3400 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3401 example).
3402
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003403- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003404 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003405 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003406 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003407
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003408- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3409 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3410 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003411 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003412
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003413- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3414 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3415 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3416 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3417 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3418 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3419
3420 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3421
3422 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3423
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003424Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003425-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003426
3427- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3428
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003429- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3430
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003431- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3432 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003433
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003434- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3435 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3436 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3437 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3438 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3439 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003440 attributes.
3441
3442- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3443 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3444 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003445
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003446- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3447 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3448 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003449
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003450- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3451 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3452 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003453 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3454 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3455
3456- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3457 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003458
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003459Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003461
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003462- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3463 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3464
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003465- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3466 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3467 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3468 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3469
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003470- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3471 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3472 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3473 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3474
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003475 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3476 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3477 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3478 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3479 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3480 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3481 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3482 without losing information).
3483
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003484- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003485 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3486 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3487 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3488 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3489 module).
3490
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003491 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003492 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3493 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3494 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3495 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003496
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003497- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003498 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3499 encoding.
3500
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003501- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3502 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003505 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3506
3507- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3508 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3509 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3510 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3511
3512- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3513
3514- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3515 ON, and OFF.
3516
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003517- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3518 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3519
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003520Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003521-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003522
3523- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3524 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3525 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003526
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003527- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3528 been added: -X and -E.
3529
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003530Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003532
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003533- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3534 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3535
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003536C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003538
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003539- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3540 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3541 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3542 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3543 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3544
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003545- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3546 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3547 as long) arguments.
3548
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003549- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3550 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3551 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3552 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3553 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3554 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3555
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003556- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3557 input.
3558
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003559New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003561
3562Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003564
3565Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003567
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003568- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3569 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3570 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3571
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003572- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3573 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3574 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003575 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003576
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003577 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3578 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3579 import signal
3580 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003581
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003582 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003583 while 1:
3584 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003586 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3587 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3588 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3589 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003590
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003591
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003592What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3593===========================
3594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3596
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003597Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003599
3600- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3601 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3602 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3603
3604- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3605 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3606 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3607 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3608 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3609 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3610 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003611
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003612- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003613 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003614 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3615 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3616 associate a docstring with a property.
3617
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003618- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3619 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3620 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3621 other built-in object types.
3622
3623- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3624 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3625 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3626 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3627 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3628
3629- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3630 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3631
3632- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3633 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003634 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003635 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3636 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3637 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3638 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3639 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3640
3641- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3642 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3643 class.
3644
3645- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3646 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3647 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3648 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3649
3650- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3651 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3652 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3653 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3654
3655- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3656 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3657
3658- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3659 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3660 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3661 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3662 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003663 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003664 with the same value as s.
3665
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003666- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3667
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003668Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003670
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003671- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3672
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003673- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3674 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3675 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3676 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3677 objects.
3678
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003679- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3680 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003681 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3682 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3683
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003684- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3685 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3686 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3687
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003688Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003689-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003690
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003691- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3692 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3693 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3694 by the instances.
3695
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003696- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3697 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3698 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3699
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003700- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3701 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3702 before the entire comparison is complete.
3703
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003704- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3705 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3706 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3707
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003708- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3709 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3710 getwriter().
3711
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003712- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3713 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3714
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003715- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003716 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3717 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3718
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003719- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3720 iterable object.
3721
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003722- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3723 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003725- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3726 authentication.
3727
3728- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3729 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003730
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003731- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003732 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3733 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3734 a sample driver.)
3735
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003736Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003738
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003739- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3740 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3741 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3742 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3743 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3744 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3745 kernel has large file support.
3746
3747- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3748 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3749 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3750 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3751 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3752
3753- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3754 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3755 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3756
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003757C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003758-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003759
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003760- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3761 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3762
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003763New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003764-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003765
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003766- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3767 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3768
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003769Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003771
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003772- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3773 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3774 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3775 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3776 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3777
3778- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3779 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3780 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3781 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3782
3783- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3784 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3785
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003786Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003788
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003789- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003790 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3791 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003792
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003793
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003794What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3795===========================
3796
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3798
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003799Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003801
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003802- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3803 big to represent as a C double.
3804
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003805- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3806 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3807 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3808 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3809 restriction).
3810
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003811- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3812 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3813 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3814 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3815 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3816
3817 >>> dir([])
3818 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3819 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3820 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3821 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3822 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3823 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3824 'reverse', 'sort']
3825
3826 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3827
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003828- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003829 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3830 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3831 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3832 OverflowError exception.
3833
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003834- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003835 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003836 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3837 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3838 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3839 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3840 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003841 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3843 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3844
3845 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3846 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3847 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3848 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003849
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003850- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003851 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3852 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3853 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3854 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3855 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3856 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3857 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3858 once it is created.
3859
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003860- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3861 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3862 (key, value) pairs.
3863
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003864- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003865 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3866 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3867
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003868- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3869 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3870 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3871 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3872 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003873
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003874- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003875 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3876 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3877
3878 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003880- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003881 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3882
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003883Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003885
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003886- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003887 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3888 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003889
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003890- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3891 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3892 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3893 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3894 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3895 in this area anymore).
3896
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003897- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3898 threading.Timer.
3899
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003900- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3901 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3902
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003903- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003904 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3905
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003906- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003907 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3908 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3909 converted to Python longs.
3910
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003911- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003912 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3913
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003914- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3915 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3916 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3917
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003918Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003920
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003921- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3922 division operators as per PEP 238.
3923
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003924Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003925-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003926
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003927- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3928 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3929 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3930 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3931
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003932C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003933-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003934
3935- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003936
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003937- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3938 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003939 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003940
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3942 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003943 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003944 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003945
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003946- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003947 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3948 module:
3949
3950 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003951
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003952 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3953 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003954
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003955 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3956 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003957
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003958 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3959
3960 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3961
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003962- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003963 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3964 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3965 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003966
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003967New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003969
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003970- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3971 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3972 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3973 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3974 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003975
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003976Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003978
3979Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003981
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003982- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3983 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3984 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3985 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003986 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3987 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3988 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3989 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3990 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003991
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003992- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003993 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3994
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003995
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003996What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3997===========================
3998
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003999*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4000
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004001Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004003
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004004- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4005 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4006
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004007- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4008 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4009 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004010
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004011- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4012 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4013 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4014 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004015
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004016- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4017
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004018- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004019
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004020Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004022
4023- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004024 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004025 the module docstring for details.
4026
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004027Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004028-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004029
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004030- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004031 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4032 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4033 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004034
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004035- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4036 Nick Mathewson.
4037
4038Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004040
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004041- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4042 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4043 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4044 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4045 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4046 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4047 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4048 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4049
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004050- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4051 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4052 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4053 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4054
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004055- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4056 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4057 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4058 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4059 come a long way).
4060
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004061- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4062 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4063 write filters for these warnings).
4064
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004065- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4066 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4067 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4068 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4069 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4070
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004071- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4072 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4073 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4074 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4075 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4076 older distribution.
4077
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004078Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004080
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004081- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4082 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004083 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004084
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004085- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4086 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4087 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4088
4089- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4090
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004091- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4092
4093- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4094
4095- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4096
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004098
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004099- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4100
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004101New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004103
4104C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004106
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004107- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4108 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4109 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4110 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4111 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4112 against buffer overruns.
4113
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004114- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004115 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4116 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004117 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4118 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4119 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4120
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004121- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4122 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4123 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4124 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4125 deprecated.
4126
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004127Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004129
4130- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4131 relevant is found.
4132
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004133
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004134What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004135===========================
4136
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4138
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004139Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004140----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004141
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004142- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4143 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4144 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4145 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4146 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4147 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4148 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4149 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004150 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004151 repaired.
4152
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004153- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004154 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004155 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4156 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4157 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4158 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4159 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4160 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4161 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4162 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4163
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004164- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4165 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4166 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4167 leading BMO character).
4168
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004169- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4170 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4171 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4172
4173 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4174 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4175 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004176
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004177 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4178 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4179 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4180 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4181 for various simple to use conversions.
4182
4183 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4184 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4185
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4187 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4188 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4189 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4190 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4191 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4192 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4193 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4194 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4195 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4196 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4197 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4198 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4199 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4200 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004201
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004202- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4203 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4204 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004205 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004206 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004207
4208 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004209 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4210 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4211 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4212 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4213 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004214 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4215 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004216
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004217 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4218 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4219 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004220 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004221
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004222- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4223 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4224 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4225 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4226 floating arithmetic,
4227
4228 x = 9007199254740992.0
4229 print long(x)
4230
4231 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4232 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4233 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4234 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4235 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4236 functions are of good quality).
4237
4238 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4239 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4240 algorithms to break.
4241
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004242- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4243 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4244 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4245 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4246 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4247 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4248 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4249 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4250 order.
4251
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004252- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4253 operation along the most common code paths.
4254
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004255- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4256 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4257
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004258- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4259 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4260 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4261 {}.update(UserDict())
4262
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004263- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4264 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4265 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4266 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4267 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4268 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4269 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4270 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4271
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004272- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004273 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004275 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004276 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4277 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004278 join() method of strings
4279 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004280 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4281 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004283 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004284
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004285- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4286 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4287
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004288- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4289 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4290
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004291- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4292 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4293 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4294 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4295
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004296- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4297 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004298 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004299 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4300 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004301
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004302- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4303
4304
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004305Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004307
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004308- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004309 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004310 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4311 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4312
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004313- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4314 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4315
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004316- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4317 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4318 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4319 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4320
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004321- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4322 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4323 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4324
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004325- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4326
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004327- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4328
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004329- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4330 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4331 that are still imported into string.py).
4332
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004333- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4334
4335- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4336 Now it does.
4337
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004338- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4339
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004340- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4341 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4342 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4343 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4344 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004345 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4346 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004347
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004348- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4349 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4350 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4351 'help(object)'.
4352
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004353Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004355
4356- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004357 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004358 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4359 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4360
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004361- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004362 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4363 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004364
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004365C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004367
4368- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4369 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370
4371----
4372
4373**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**