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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
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +000013-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000014
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +000015- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
16 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
17 (SF patch #664376.)
18
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000019- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
20 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
21 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
22 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
23 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
24 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +000025 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000026
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +000027- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
28 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
29 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
30 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
31 __init__: "def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass".
32
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +000033- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
34 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
35 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
36 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
37 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
38 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
39 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
40 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
41 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
42 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
43 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
44
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +000045- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
46 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
47 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
48 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
49 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
50 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
51
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +000052- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
53 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
54
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +000055- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
56 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
57 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
58 case.)
59
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +000060- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
61 passed as unicode strings.
62
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +000063- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
64 See SF bug #683467.
65
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +000066- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
67 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
68
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +000069- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
70
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000071- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
72
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000073- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
74 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
75 arguments.
76
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000077- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
78 See SF bug #667147.
79
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000080- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +000081 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000082 See SF bug #676155.
83
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000084- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000085 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000086 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
87 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
88 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
89 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
90 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
91 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000092
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000093Extension modules
94-----------------
95
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +000096- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
97 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
98 tp_as_number pointer.
99
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000100- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
101 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
102 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
103 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
104 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
105
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000106- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
107
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000108- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000109 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000110 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
111 patch #678531.)
112
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000113- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
114 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
115
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000116- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
117 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
118
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000119- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
120 library.
121
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000122- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
123
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000124- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
125 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
126 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
127
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000128- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
129
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000130- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
131 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
132
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000133- datetime changes:
134
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000135 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
136 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
137 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
138 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
139 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
140 now.
141
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000142 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000143 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
144 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000145
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000146 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000147 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000148 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
149 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
150 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
151 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000152
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000153 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
154 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
155 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000156 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
157
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000158 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
159 by a later example coded by Guido.
160
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000161 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000162 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
163 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
164 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000165 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
166 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
167
168 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
169 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
170 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
171 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
172 tzinfo subclass instance.
173
174 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
175 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
176 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
177 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
178 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
179 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
180 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
181 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000182
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000183 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
184 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
185 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
186 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
187 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
188 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
189 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
190 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
191 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
192 as a naive datetime object.
193
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000194 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
195 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
196 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
197
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000198 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
199 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
200 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
201 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
202 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
203 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
204 comparison.
205
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000206 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
207 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
208 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
209 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
210 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example,
211
212 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
213 and
214 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
215
216 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
217 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
218 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
219 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
220
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000221 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
222 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
223 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
224 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
225 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
226
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000227 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
228 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000229 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
230 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000231
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000232Library
233-------
234
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000235- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
236 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000237 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
238 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
239 available from the os module.
240 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000241
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000242- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
243 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
244
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000245- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
246 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
247 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
248
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000249- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
250
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000251- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
252 exception.
253
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000254- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
255 class.
256
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000257- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
258 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
259 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
260
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000261- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
262 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
263
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000264- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
265 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
266 See SF bug #659228.
267
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000268- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
269 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
270 See SF patch #651082.
271
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000272- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000273
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000274- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
275 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
276
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000277- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000278 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000279
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000280Tools/Demos
281-----------
282
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000283- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
284 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
285 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
286 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
287 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
288 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
289 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
290 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
291 example:
292
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000293 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
294 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000295
296 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
297
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000298
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000299Build
300-----
301
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000302- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
303 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
304 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
305 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like
306 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
307
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000308- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
309 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
310 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
311 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
312 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
313 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
314 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
315 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
316 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
317
318- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
319 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
320 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
321 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
322
323- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
324 from the Tools/scripts directory.
325
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000326C API
327-----
328
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000329- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a PyFrameObject *
330 instead of a plain PyObject *. (SF patch #686601.)
331
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000332- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
333 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
334 tp_as_number pointer.
335
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000336- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
337 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
338 (SF #681367)
339
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000340- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
341 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
342 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
343 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000344
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000345
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000346New platforms
347-------------
348
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000349TBD
350
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000351Tests
352-----
353
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000354TBD
355
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000356Windows
357-------
358
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000359- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
360 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
361
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000362- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
363 release without strong cryptography.
364
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000365- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
366 absolute pathname.
367
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000368- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
369 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
370
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000371Mac
372---
373
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000374- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
375 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000376
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000377- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
378 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
379 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000380
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000381- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
382 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000383
384- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
385 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
386 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
387 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
388
389- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000390 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
391 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
392 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000393
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000394
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000395What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000396=================================
397
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000398*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000399
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000400Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000401--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000402
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000403- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
404
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000405- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
406 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000407 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000408 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000409 a different meaning than before.
410
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000411- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000412 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000413 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000414
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000415- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000416 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000417 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000418
419- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
420 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
421 and deallocation.
422
423- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
424 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
425
426- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
427 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
428 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
429 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
430 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
431
432- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
433 now detected by the garbage collector.
434
435- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
436 [SF bug 519621]
437
438- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
439 identifier.
440
441- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
442 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
443 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
444 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
445 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
446 [SF bug 563060]
447
448- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
449 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
450 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
451 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
452 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
453
454- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
455 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
456 not called. [SF bug #537450]
457
458- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
459
460- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
461 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
462 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
463 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
464 state of the slots would be lost.)
465
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000466Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000467-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000468
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000469- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000470 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
471 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
472 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
473 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000474 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
475 Jython 2.1.
476
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000477- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000478 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000479 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
480 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
481 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
482 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
483 these, see PEP 302.
484
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000485- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
486 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
487 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
488
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000489- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
490 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
491 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
492
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000493- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
494 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
495 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
496
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000497- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
498 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
499 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
500 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
501 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
502 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
503 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
504 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
505 releases or implementations.
506
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000507- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000508 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
509 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000510
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000511- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
512 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
513
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000514- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
515 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
516 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
517
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000518- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
519 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
520
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000521- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
522 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000523 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
524 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000525
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000526- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
527 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
528 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
529 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
530 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
531
532 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
533 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
534 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
535 pattern.
536
537 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
538 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
539 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
540 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
541
542 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
543 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
544 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
545 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
546 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
547 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
548
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000549- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
550 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
551 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
552 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
553 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
554 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
555 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
556 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000557
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000558- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
559 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
560 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
561 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
562 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000563 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
564 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
565 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
566 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
567 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
568 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
569 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000570
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000571- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
572 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
573
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000574- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
575 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
576 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
577 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
578 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
579 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
580 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
581 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
582 to Zack Weinberg!
583
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000584- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
585 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
586 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
587 type. This has been fixed now.
588
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000589- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
590 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
591 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
592
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000593- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
594 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
595 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
596 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
597 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
598 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
599 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
600 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000601 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000602
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000603- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
604 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
605 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000606
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000607- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
608 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
609 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
610 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
611 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
612 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
613 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
614 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000615 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000616 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
617 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
618
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000619- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
620 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
621 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
622 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
623 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
624 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
625 this.)
626
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000627- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
628 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000629 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000630 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000631 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
632 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000633 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
634 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000635
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000636- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
637 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
638 currently running.
639
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000640- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
641 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
642 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
643 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
644
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000645- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
646 as directory names.
647
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000648- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
649 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
650
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000651- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
652 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
653
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000654- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000655 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
656 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000657
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000658- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
659 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
660 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
661 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
662 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
663
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000664- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
665 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
666 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
667 removed.
668
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000669- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
670 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
671 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
672
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000673- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
674 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
675 to __debug__.
676
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000677- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
678 string to the left with zeros. For example,
679 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
680
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000681- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
682 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
683 deprecated now.
684
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000685- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
686 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
687 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000688
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000689- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
690 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
691 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
692 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
693 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000694
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000695- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
696 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
697
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000698- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
699 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
700 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000701 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000702 is backward compatible.
703
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000704- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
705 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
706 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
707 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
708 could access a pointer to freed memory.
709
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000710- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
711 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
712 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
713 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
714 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
715 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000716
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000717- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
718 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
719
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000720- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
721 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
722
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000723- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
724 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
725 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
726 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
727 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
728
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000729- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
730 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
731 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
732
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000733- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000734 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
735
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000736- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
737 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
738 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000739
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000740- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
741 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
742
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000743- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
744 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
745 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
746
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000747- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
748
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000749Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000750-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000751
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000752- Added three operators to the operator module:
753 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
754 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
755 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
756
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000757- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
758
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000759- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
760 archives.
761
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000762- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
763 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
764 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
765
766 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
767
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000768- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
769 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
770 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000771 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000772
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000773- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
774 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
775 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
776 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000777 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
778 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
779 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
780 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000781
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000782- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
783 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000784
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000785- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
786
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000787- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
788 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
789
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000790- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
791 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
792 supported.
793
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000794- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
795
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000796- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
797 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000798
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000799- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
800 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
801
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000802- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
803
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000804- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
805 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
806
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000807- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
808 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
809 functions but callable type objects.
810
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000811- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000812 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000813 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000814
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000815- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
816 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000817
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000818- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
819 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000820
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000821- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
822 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
823 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
824 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
825
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000826- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
827 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000828
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000829- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
830 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
831 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
832 and __imul__.
833
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000834- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000835 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
836 is called.
837
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000838- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
839 been added where available.
840
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000841- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
842 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
843 interpreter was compiled.
844
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000845- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
846 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
847 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000848 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000849 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
850 1, not 2.
851
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000852- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
853 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
854 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
855 limit.
856
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000857- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
858 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
859 bug #623464.
860
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000861- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
862 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
863 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
864 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
865
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000866Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000867-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000868
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000869- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
870
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000871- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
872 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
873 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
874 with Python 2.3a2.
875
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000876- os.path exposes getctime.
877
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000878- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
879 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
880 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
881 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
882 unit tests of floating point results.
883
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000884- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
885 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
886 has been increased.
887
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000888- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
889 executed.
890
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000891- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
892 postinstallation script.
893
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000894- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
895 test the current module.
896
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000897- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
898 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
899 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
900 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
901 this behavior needs to be controlled.
902
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000903- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000904 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000905 Ward's Optik package.
906
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000907- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
908 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
909 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
910 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
911
912- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
913 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000914 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000915
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000916- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
917 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
918 shelf are binary pickles.
919
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000920- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
921 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
922
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000923- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
924 modules are iterators now.
925
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000926- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
927 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
928 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
929 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
930 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
931 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000932
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000933- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
934 with their entity value.
935
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000936- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
937
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000938- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
939 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000940
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000941- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
942 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000943 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000944
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000945- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
946 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
947 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
948 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
949 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
950 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
951 main():
952
953 import locale
954 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
955
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000956- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
957 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
958
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000959- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
960 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
961 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
962 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
963 to the new standard.
964
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000965- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
966 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
967 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
968 an extension to the database.
969
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000970- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
971 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
972 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
973 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000974 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000975
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000976- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000977 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000978
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000979- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
980 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
981 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
982 bounded integers.
983
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000984- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
985 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
986 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
987 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
988 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
989 in existence.
990
991 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
992 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
993 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
994 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
995 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
996 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
997
998 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
999 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1000 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1001 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1002
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001003- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1004 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1005 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1006
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001007- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1008
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001009- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1010 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1011 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1012 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1013
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001014- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1015 argument.
1016
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001017- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1018 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1019 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1020 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1021 [SF patch 560794].
1022
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001023- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1024 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1025 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001026 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1027 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1028 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001029
1030- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1031 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001032
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001033- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1034 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1035 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1036 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001037
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001038- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1039 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1040 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1041 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1042 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1043
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001044- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001045
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001046- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1047
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001048- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1049 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1050 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1051 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1052 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1053 identical to None.
1054
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001055- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1056 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1057 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1058 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1059 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1060 results now.
1061
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001062- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1063 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1064
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001065- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1066 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1067 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1068 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1069 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1070 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1071 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1072 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1073
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001074- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1075
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001076- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1077 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1078
1079- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1080 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1081 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1082 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1083 and other systems.
1084
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001085- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1086 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1087 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1088 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 +00001089 work well with these.
1090
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001091- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1092
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001093- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001094 connections.
1095
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001096- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1097 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1098 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1099
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001100- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1101 sets
1102
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001103- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1104 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1105 name.
1106
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001107- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1108 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1109 passed in.
1110
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001111- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001112 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001113 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1114 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001115
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001116- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1117
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001118- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1119
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001120- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1121 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1122 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1123
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001124- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1125 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1126 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1127 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001128 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001129
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001130- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001131 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001132 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001133
1134- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1135 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1136 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1137
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001138- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001139 the value of its expression argument.
1140
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001141- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1142 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1143 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1144
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001145- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1146 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1147 skipstone browser was included.
1148
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001149- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1150 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1151
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001152Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001153-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001154
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001155- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1156 names in addition to accepting file names.
1157
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001158- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1159 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1160 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1161 still used and useful.)
1162
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001163- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1164 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1165 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1166 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001167
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001168- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1169 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1170 the generated binary.
1171
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001172Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001173-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001174
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001175- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1176
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001177- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1178 except in the hands of experts.
1179
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001180- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001181 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1182 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1183 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001184
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001185- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1186 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1187 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1188 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1189 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1190 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1191 builds.
1192
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001193- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1194 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1195 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1196 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1197 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1198 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1199 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1200 new type.
1201
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001202- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001203
1204 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1205 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1206 positive infinities.
1207
1208 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1209 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1210 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1211 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1212 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1213 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1214 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1215
1216 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1217
1218 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1219
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001220- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1221 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1222 size of the executable.
1223
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001224- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1225 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1226 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1227 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001228
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001229- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1230
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001231- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1232 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1233 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001234
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001235- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1236 well as Unix.
1237
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001238- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1239 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1240 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1241 modules in the README file for details.
1242
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001243C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001244-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001245
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001246- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1247 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001248 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001249 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001250 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001251
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001252- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1253 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1254 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1255 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1256 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1257 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1258 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1259 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1260 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1261 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1262 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1263 aligned.)
1264
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001265- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1266 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1267 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1268
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001269- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1270 level.
1271
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001272- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1273 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1274 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1275 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1276 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1277
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001278- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1279 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1280 code.
1281
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001282- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1283 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1284 adjusting for negative indices.
1285
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001286- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1287 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1288 object.
1289
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001290- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1291 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1292 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1293
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001294- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1295 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001296
1297- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1298
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001299- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1300 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1301 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1302 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1303
1304- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1305
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001306- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001307
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001308- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001309 without going through the buffer API.
1310
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001311- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001312
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001313- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1314 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1315 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1316 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1317
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001318- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1319 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1320
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001321- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001322 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1323
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001324New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001325-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001326
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001327- OpenVMS is now supported.
1328
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001329- AtheOS is now supported.
1330
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001331- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1332
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001333- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1334
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001335Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001336-----
1337
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001338- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1339 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1340 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001341
1342Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001343-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001344
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001345- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1346 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1347 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1348 bugs.
1349 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001350 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1351 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1352 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001353 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001354
1355- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001356 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001357
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001358- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1359 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1360
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001361- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1362 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1363 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1364 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1365
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001366- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1367 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1368 use files" uninstall option).
1369
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001370- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1371
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001372- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1373 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1374
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001375- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1376 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1377 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1378
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001379- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1380 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1381 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1382 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1383 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001384 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1385 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1386 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001387
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001388- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001389 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001390 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1391 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1392 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1393 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1394 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1395 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1396 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1397 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1398 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1399 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1400 work around.
1401
1402- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1403 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1404 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1405 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1406 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1407 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1408 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1409 specified with O_CREAT too).
1410
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001411Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001412----
1413
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001414- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001415
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001416- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1417 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1418 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1419
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001420- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1421 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1422 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1423
1424- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1425 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1426 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1427 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1428 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1429 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1430 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1431 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001432
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001433- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1434 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1435 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001436
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001437- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1438 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1439 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1440 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1441 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001442
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001443- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1444 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1445 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001447- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1448 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001449
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001450- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1451 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1452 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1453 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1454 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001455
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001456- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1457 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1458 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1459
1460- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1461 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1462 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001463
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001464- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1465 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1466 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1467 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1468 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001469
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001470- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1471 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001472
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001473- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1474 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001475
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001476- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1477 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1478 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1479 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001480
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001481What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001482===============================
1483
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001484*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1485
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001486Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001487--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001488
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001489- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1490 with a custom metaclass.
1491
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001492Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001493-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001494
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001495- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1496 are proxies.
1497
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001498Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001499-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001500
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001501- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1502 very short strings.
1503
1504- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1505 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1506 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1507 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1508 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1509
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001510Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001511-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001512
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001513- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1514 close or delete time).
1515
1516- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1517 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1518
1519- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1520
1521- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001522 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001523
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001524Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001525-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001526
1527Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001528-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001529
1530C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001531-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001532
1533New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001534-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001535
1536Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001537-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001538
1539Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001540-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001541
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001542- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1543
1544- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1545 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1546
1547- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1548 deleted at process exit time.
1549
1550- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1551 in backslash.
1552
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001553Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001554----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001555
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001556- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1557 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1558 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1559
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001560
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001561What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001562===========================
1563
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001564*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1565
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001566Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001567--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001568
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001569- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1570 been extensively updated. See
1571
1572 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1573
1574 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1575
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001576- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1577 deleted!
1578
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001579- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1580 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1581 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1582 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1583 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1584
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001585- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1586
1587 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1588 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1589
1590 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1591 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1592 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1593 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1594 supported anyway.
1595
1596 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1597 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1598
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001599- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1600 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1601 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1602 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1603 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001604
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001605- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1606 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1607 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1608
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001609Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001610-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001611
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001612- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1613 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1614 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1615 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1616 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1617 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001618 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1619 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1620 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1621 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001622
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001623- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1624 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1625 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1626
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001627Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001628-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001629
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001630- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1631
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001632Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001633-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001634
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001635- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1636 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1637 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1638 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1639 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1640 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1641
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001642- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1643
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001644- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1645
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001646- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1647
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001648- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1649 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1650 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1651
1652- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1653
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001654Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001655-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001656
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001657- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1658 off a search on Google.
1659
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001660Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001661-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001662
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001663- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1664 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1665 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1666 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1667 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1668 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1669 other platforms should do likewise.
1670
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001671- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1672 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1673 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1674
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001675C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001676-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001677
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001678- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1679 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1680 producing key-value pairs.
1681
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001682- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001683 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001684 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1685 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1686 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1687 previously went unchallenged.
1688
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001689New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001690-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001691
1692Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001693-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001694
1695Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001696-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001697
1698Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001699----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001700
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001701- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1702 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001703
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001704- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1705 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1706 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1707 home.
1708
1709
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001710What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001711===========================
1712
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001713*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1714
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001715Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001716--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001717
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001718- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1719 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001720
1721 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001722 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001723
1724 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1725 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001726 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001727 This needs to be documented.
1728
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001729- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1730 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1731
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001732- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1733 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1734 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1735
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001736- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1737 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1738
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001739- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1740 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1741 class forbids it).
1742
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001743- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1744 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1745 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1746
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001747- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1748
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001749Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001750-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001751
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001752- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1753 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001754 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001755
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001756- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1757 (like 1 + '').
1758
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001759Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001760-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001761
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001762- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1763 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1764 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1765 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001766 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001767 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1768
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001769- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1770 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1771 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1772 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1773
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001774- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1775 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001776 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1777 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1778 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001779
1780- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1781 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001782
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001783- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1784 bytes on its input.
1785
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001786Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001787-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001788
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001789- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001790 convenience function.
1791
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001792- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1793 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1794 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001795 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1796 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1797 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1798 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1799 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1800 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001801
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001802- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1803 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1804 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1805 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1806
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001807- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1808 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1809 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1810
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001811- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1812 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1813 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1814 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1815
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001816- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1817 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001818 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001819 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1820 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1821 new -l and -e options.
1822
1823- statcache is now deprecated.
1824
1825- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1826 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001827 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001828 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1829 time properly taken into account.
1830
1831- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1832 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1833 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1834 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1835
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001836Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001837-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001838
1839Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001840-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001841
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001842- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1843 is built with libdb3 if available.
1844
1845- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1846
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001847C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001848-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001849
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001850- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1851 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1852 PySequence_Size().
1853
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001854- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1855
1856- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1857 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1858 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1859
1860- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1861 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1862
1863- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1864 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1865
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001866New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001867-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001868
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001869- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1870 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1871
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001872- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1873 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1874
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001875- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1876
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001877Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001878-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001879
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001880- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1881 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1882
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001883Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001884-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001885
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001886Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001887----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001888
1889- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1890 removed completely in the next release.
1891
1892- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1893 OSX.
1894
1895- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1896 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1897
1898- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1899
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001900
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001901What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001902===========================
1903
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001904*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1905
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001906Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001907--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001908
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001909- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001910 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001911 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001912 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1913 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001914 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1915 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001916 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1917 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001918
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001919- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1920 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1921
1922- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1923 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1924
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001925Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001926-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001927
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001928- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1929 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1930 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1931 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1932 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1933 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1934 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1935 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1936
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001937- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1938 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1939 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1940 example).
1941
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001942- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001943 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001944 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001945 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001946
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001947- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1948 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1949 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001950 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001951
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001952- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1953 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1954 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1955 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1956 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1957 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1958
1959 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1960
1961 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1962
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001963Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001964-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001965
1966- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1967
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001968- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1969
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001970- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1971 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001972
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001973- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1974 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1975 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1976 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1977 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1978 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001979 attributes.
1980
1981- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1982 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1983 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001984
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001985- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1986 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1987 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001988
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001989- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1990 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1991 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001992 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1993 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1994
1995- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1996 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001997
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001998Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001999-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002000
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002001- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2002 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2003
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002004- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2005 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2006 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2007 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2008
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002009- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2010 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2011 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2012 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2013
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002014 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2015 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2016 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2017 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2018 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2019 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2020 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2021 without losing information).
2022
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002023- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002024 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2025 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2026 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2027 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2028 module).
2029
2030 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
2031 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2032 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2033 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2034 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002035
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002036- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002037 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2038 encoding.
2039
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002040- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2041 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2042
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002043- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002044 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2045
2046- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2047 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2048 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2049 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2050
2051- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2052
2053- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2054 ON, and OFF.
2055
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002056- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2057 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2058
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002059Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002060-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002061
2062- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2063 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2064 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002065
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002066- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2067 been added: -X and -E.
2068
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002069Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002070-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002071
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002072- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2073 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2074
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002075C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002077
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002078- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2079 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2080 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2081 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2082 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2083
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002084- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2085 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2086 as long) arguments.
2087
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002088- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2089 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2090 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2091 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2092 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2093 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2094
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002095- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2096 input.
2097
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002098New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002099-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002100
2101Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002102-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002103
2104Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002105-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002106
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002107- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2108 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2109 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2110
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002111- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2112 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2113 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002114 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002115
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002116 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2117 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2118 import signal
2119 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002120
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002121 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002122 while 1:
2123 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002124 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002125 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2126 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2127 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2128 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002129
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002130
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002131What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2132===========================
2133
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002134*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2135
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002136Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002137--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002138
2139- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2140 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2141 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2142
2143- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2144 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2145 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2146 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2147 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2148 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2149 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002150
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002151- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002152 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002153 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2154 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2155 associate a docstring with a property.
2156
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002157- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2158 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2159 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2160 other built-in object types.
2161
2162- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2163 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2164 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2165 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2166 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2167
2168- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2169 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2170
2171- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2172 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002173 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002174 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2175 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2176 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2177 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2178 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2179
2180- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2181 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2182 class.
2183
2184- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2185 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2186 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2187 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2188
2189- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2190 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2191 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2192 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2193
2194- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2195 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2196
2197- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2198 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2199 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2200 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2201 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002202 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002203 with the same value as s.
2204
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002205- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2206
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002207Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002208----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002209
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002210- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2211
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002212- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2213 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2214 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2215 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2216 objects.
2217
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002218- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2219 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002220 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2221 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2222
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002223- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2224 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2225 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2226
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002227Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002228-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002229
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002230- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2231 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2232 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2233 by the instances.
2234
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002235- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2236 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2237 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2238
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002239- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2240 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2241 before the entire comparison is complete.
2242
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002243- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2244 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2245 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2246
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002247- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2248 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2249 getwriter().
2250
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002251- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2252 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2253
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002254- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002255 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2256 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2257
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002258- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2259 iterable object.
2260
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002261- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2262 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002263
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002264- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2265 authentication.
2266
2267- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2268 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002269
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002270- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002271 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2272 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2273 a sample driver.)
2274
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002275Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002276-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002277
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002278- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2279 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2280 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2281 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2282 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2283 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2284 kernel has large file support.
2285
2286- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2287 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2288 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2289 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2290 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2291
2292- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2293 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2294 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2295
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002296C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002297-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002298
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002299- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2300 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2301
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002302New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002303-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002304
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002305- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2306 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2307
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002308Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002309-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002310
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002311- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2312 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2313 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2314 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2315 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2316
2317- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2318 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2319 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2320 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2321
2322- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2323 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2324
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002325Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002326-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002327
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002328- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002329 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2330 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002331
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002332
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002333What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2334===========================
2335
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002336*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2337
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002338Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002339----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002340
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002341- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2342 big to represent as a C double.
2343
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002344- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2345 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2346 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2347 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2348 restriction).
2349
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002350- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2351 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2352 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2353 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2354 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2355
2356 >>> dir([])
2357 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2358 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2359 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2360 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2361 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2362 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2363 'reverse', 'sort']
2364
2365 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2366
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002367- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002368 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2369 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2370 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2371 OverflowError exception.
2372
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002373- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002374 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002375 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2376 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2377 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2378 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2379 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002380 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002381 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2382 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2383
2384 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2385 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2386 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2387 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002388
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002389- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002390 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2391 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2392 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2393 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2394 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2395 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2396 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2397 once it is created.
2398
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002399- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2400 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2401 (key, value) pairs.
2402
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002403- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002404 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2405 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2406
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002407- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2408 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2409 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2410 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2411 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002412
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002413- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002414 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2415 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2416
2417 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2418
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002419- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002420 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2421
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002422Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002423-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002424
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002425- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002426 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2427 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002428
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002429- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2430 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2431 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2432 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2433 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2434 in this area anymore).
2435
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002436- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2437 threading.Timer.
2438
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002439- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2440 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2441
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002442- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002443 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2444
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002445- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002446 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2447 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2448 converted to Python longs.
2449
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002450- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002451 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2452
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002453- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2454 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2455 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2456
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002457Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002458-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002459
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002460- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2461 division operators as per PEP 238.
2462
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002463Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002464-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002465
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002466- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2467 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2468 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2469 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2470
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002471C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002472-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002473
2474- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002475
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002476- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2477 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002478 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002479
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002480 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2481 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002482 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002483 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002484
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002485- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002486 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2487 module:
2488
2489 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002490
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002491 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2492 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002493
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002494 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2495 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002496
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002497 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2498
2499 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2500
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002501- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002502 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2503 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2504 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002505
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002506New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002507-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002508
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002509- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2510 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2511 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2512 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2513 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002514
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002515Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002516-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002517
2518Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002519-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002520
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002521- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2522 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2523 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2524 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002525 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2526 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2527 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2528 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2529 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002530
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002531- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002532 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2533
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002534
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002535What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2536===========================
2537
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002538*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2539
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002540Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002541-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002542
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002543- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2544 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2545
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002546- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2547 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2548 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002549
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002550- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2551 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2552 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2553 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002554
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002555- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2556
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002557- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002558
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002559Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002560-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002561
2562- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002563 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002564 the module docstring for details.
2565
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002566Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002567-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002568
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002569- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002570 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2571 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2572 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002573
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002574- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2575 Nick Mathewson.
2576
2577Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002578----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002579
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002580- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2581 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2582 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2583 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2584 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2585 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2586 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2587 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2588
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002589- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2590 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2591 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2592 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2593
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002594- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2595 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2596 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2597 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2598 come a long way).
2599
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002600- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2601 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2602 write filters for these warnings).
2603
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002604- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2605 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2606 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2607 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2608 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2609
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002610- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2611 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2612 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2613 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2614 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2615 older distribution.
2616
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002617Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002619
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002620- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2621 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002622 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002623
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002624- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2625 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2626 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2627
2628- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2629
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002630- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2631
2632- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2633
2634- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2635
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002636- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002637
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002638- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2639
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002640New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002641-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002642
2643C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002644-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002645
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002646- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2647 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2648 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2649 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2650 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2651 against buffer overruns.
2652
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002653- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002654 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2655 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002656 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2657 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2658 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2659
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002660- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2661 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2662 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2663 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2664 deprecated.
2665
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002666Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002668
2669- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2670 relevant is found.
2671
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002672
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002673What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002674===========================
2675
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002676*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2677
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002678Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002679----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002680
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002681- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2682 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2683 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2684 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2685 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2686 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2687 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2688 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002689 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002690 repaired.
2691
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002692- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002693 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002694 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2695 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2696 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2697 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2698 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2699 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2700 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2701 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2702
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002703- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2704 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2705 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2706 leading BMO character).
2707
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002708- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2709 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2710 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2711
2712 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2713 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2714 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002715
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002716 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2717 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2718 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2719 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2720 for various simple to use conversions.
2721
2722 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2723 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2726 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2727 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2728 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2729 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2730 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2731 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2732 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2733 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2734 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2735 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2736 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2737 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2738 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2739 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002740
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002741- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2742 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2743 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002744 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002745 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002746
2747 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002748 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2749 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2750 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2751 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2752 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002753 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2754 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002755
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002756 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2757 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2758 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002759 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002760
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002761- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2762 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2763 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2764 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2765 floating arithmetic,
2766
2767 x = 9007199254740992.0
2768 print long(x)
2769
2770 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2771 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2772 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2773 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2774 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2775 functions are of good quality).
2776
2777 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2778 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2779 algorithms to break.
2780
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002781- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2782 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2783 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2784 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2785 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2786 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2787 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2788 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2789 order.
2790
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002791- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2792 operation along the most common code paths.
2793
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002794- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2795 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2796
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002797- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2798 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2799 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2800 {}.update(UserDict())
2801
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002802- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2803 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2804 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2805 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2806 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2807 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2808 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2809 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2810
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002811- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002812 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002813
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002814 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002815 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2816 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002817 join() method of strings
2818 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002819 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2820 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002821 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002822 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002823
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002824- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2825 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2826
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002827- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2828 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2829
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002830- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2831 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2832 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2833 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2834
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002835- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2836 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002837 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002838 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2839 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002840
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002841- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2842
2843
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002844Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002846
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002847- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002848 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002849 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2850 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2851
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002852- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2853 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2854
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002855- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2856 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2857 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2858 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2859
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002860- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2861 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2862 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2863
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002864- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2865
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002866- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2867
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002868- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2869 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2870 that are still imported into string.py).
2871
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002872- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2873
2874- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2875 Now it does.
2876
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002877- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2878
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002879- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2880 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2881 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2882 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2883 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002884 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2885 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002886
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002887- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2888 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2889 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2890 'help(object)'.
2891
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002892Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002894
2895- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002896 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002897 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2898 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2899
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002900- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002901 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2902 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002903
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002904C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002905-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002906
2907- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2908 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002909
2910----
2911
2912**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**