blob: a1dfa457ceeb9c2ac33850185e796f176201d7ee [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
20
21Library
22-------
23
24- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000025 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000026
27
28Build
29-----
30
31
32C API
33-----
34
35
36Tests
37-----
38
39
40Mac
41---
42
43
44
45Tools/Demos
46-----------
47
48
49
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000050What's New in Python 2.4 final?
51===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000052
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000053*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000054
55Core and builtins
56-----------------
57
58- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
59 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
60 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
61
62
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +000063What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
64==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000065
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +000066*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000067
68Core and builtins
69-----------------
70
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +000071- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
72 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
73 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
74
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000075
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000076Library
77-------
78
79- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
80 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
81 raised is re-raised.
82
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +000083- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
84 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
85
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +000086- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
87 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
88 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
89 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
90 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
91 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
92 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
93 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
94 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
95 by the slice are recomputed now.
96
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +000097- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +000098
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000099Build
100-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000101
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000102- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
103 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
104 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000105
106C API
107-----
108
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000109- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
110
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000111
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000112What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
113================================
114
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000115*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000116
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000117License
118-------
119
120The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
121is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
122changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
123Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
124intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
125durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
126the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
127License::
128
129 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
130
131says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
132to Python 2.1.1.
133
134The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
135License Version 2.
136
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000137Core and builtins
138-----------------
139
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000140- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
141 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
142 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
143 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
144 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
145 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
146 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
147 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
148 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
149 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
150
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000151- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000152
153Extension Modules
154-----------------
155
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000156- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
157 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
158 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
159 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000160
161Library
162-------
163
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000164- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
165 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
166 returned.
167
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000168- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
169
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000170- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
171 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
172
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000173- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
174
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000175- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
176 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000177
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000178- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
179
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000180- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
181
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000182- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000183 the source code is updated and reloaded.
184
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000185Build
186-----
187
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000188- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000189
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000190What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
191================================
192
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000193*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000194
195Core and builtins
196-----------------
197
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000198- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000199 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
200
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000201- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
202 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
203 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
204 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
205
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000206- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
207 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
208
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000209- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
210 constant.
211
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000212- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
213 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
214 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
215 large), and to anomalies such as
216 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
217 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
218 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
219 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000220
221Extension modules
222-----------------
223
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000224- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
225 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000226 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
227 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
228 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000229
230Library
231-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000232
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000233- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000234 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000235 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
236 --swig-cpp.
237
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000238- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
239 it is set.
240
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000241- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000242
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000243- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
244 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
245 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
246 Closes bug #1039270.
247
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000248- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000249
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000250 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000251 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
252 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
253 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
254 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
255 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
256 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
257 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
258 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
259 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
260 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
261 + Updates to documentation.
262
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000263- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
264 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
265 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
266 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
267
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000268- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000269
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000270- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
271 applications should use the getmember function.
272
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000273- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
274
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000275- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
276 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
277 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
278 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
279 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
280 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
281 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
282 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
283 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
284
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000285- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
286 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000287 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000288
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000289- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
290 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
291 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
292 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
293 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
294 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
295 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
296 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000297
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000298- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
299 the new public features (of which there are many).
300
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000301- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000302 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
303 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
304 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
305 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000306 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000307
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000308- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
309
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000310- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
311 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
312 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
313 options.
314
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000315- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
316 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
317 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
318 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
319 conditions under which non-string values work.
320
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000321Build
322-----
323
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000324- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
325 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
326 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
327
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000328- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
329 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
330 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
331 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
332 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000333
334C API
335-----
336
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000337- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
338 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
339
340- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
341
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000342- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
343 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
344 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
345 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
346 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
347 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
348 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
349 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
350 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
351
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000352- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
353
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000354- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
355 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
356 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000357
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000358Tests
359-----
360
361- test__locale ported to unittest
362
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000363Mac
364---
365
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000366- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
367 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
368 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000369
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000370Tools/Demos
371-----------
372
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000373- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
374 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
375 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
376 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
377 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000378
379
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000380What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
381=================================
382
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000383*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000384
385Core and builtins
386-----------------
387
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000388- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000389 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
390
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000391- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
392 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
393 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
394 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
395 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
396 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
397 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
398 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000399 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
400 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
401 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
402 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
403 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000404
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000405- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
406 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
407 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
408 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
409 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
410
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000411- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
412
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000413- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
414 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
415
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000416- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
417 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
418 modified the list.
419
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000420- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
421 functions is now writable.
422
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000423- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
424 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
425 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
426 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
427
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000428- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
429 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
430 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
431 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
432 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000433
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000434- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
435 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
436
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000437Extension modules
438-----------------
439
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000440- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
441
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000442- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
443 data.
444
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000445- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
446 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
447 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
448 supposed to have been truncated away.
449
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000450- Added socket.socketpair().
451
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000452- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
453 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
454
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000455- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000456 versions of Python, have now been removed.
457
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000458Library
459-------
460
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000461- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000462 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000463
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000464- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
465 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
466
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000467- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
468 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
469
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000470- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
471
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000472- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
473 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000474
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000475- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
476 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
477
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000478- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
479
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000480- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
481
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000482- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
483
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000484- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
485 Percivall.
486
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000487- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
488 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
489
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000490- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
491 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
492 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000493 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000494
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000495- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
496 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
497 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
498 and exponent.
499
500- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
501
502- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
503 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
504 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
505
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000506- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
507 to the readline module.
508
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000509- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000510 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
511 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000512
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000513- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
514 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
515 contains symlinks.
516
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000517- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
518 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
519
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000520- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
521 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
522 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
523
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000524- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
525 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
526 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
527 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
528 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
529 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
530 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
531 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
532 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
533 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
534 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
535 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
536 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
537
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000538- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
539
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000540Tools/Demos
541-----------
542
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000543- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
544 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
545
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000546- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
547
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000548Build
549-----
550
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000551- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
552 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
553 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
554 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
555 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
556 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
557 plans to do so.
558
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000559- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
560 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
561
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000562- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
563 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
564
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000565- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
566 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
567
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000568- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
569 GNU/k*BSD systems.
570
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000571- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
572 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
573
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000574C API
575-----
576
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000577..
578
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000579Documentation
580-------------
581
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000582- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
583 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
584
585- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
586 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
587 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000588
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000589New platforms
590-------------
591
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000592- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
593
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000594Tests
595-----
596
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000597..
598
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000599Windows
600-------
601
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000602- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
603 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
604 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
605 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
606 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
607 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
608 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
609 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
610 the problem.
611
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000612Mac
613---
614
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000615..
616
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000617
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000618What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
619=================================
620
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000621*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000622
623Core and builtins
624-----------------
625
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000626- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
627 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
628 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
629 sensitive code.
630
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000631- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000632 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000633
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000634 @staticmethod
635 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000636
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000637 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000638
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000639- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
640 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
641 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
642 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
643 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
644 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
645 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
646 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
647 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
648 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
649 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
650
651 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
652 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
653 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
654 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
655 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
656 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
657 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
658
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000659- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
660 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
661
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000662- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000663 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000664
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000665- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000666 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000667 which was missing for no apparent reason.
668
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000669- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000670 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
671 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
672
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000673- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
674 types that support garbage collection.
675
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000676- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
677
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000678- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
679 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
680 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
681 Jython.
682
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000683- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
684
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000685- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
686 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
687
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000688- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
689 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
690 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000691
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000692- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
693 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
694 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
695
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000696Extension modules
697-----------------
698
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000699- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
700
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000701Library
702-------
703
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000704- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
705 TIS-620
706
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000707- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
708 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
709 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
710 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
711 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
712 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
713 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
714 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
715 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
716 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
717
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000718- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
719
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000720- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
721 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
722 same as when the argument is omitted).
723 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
724
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000725- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
726
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000727- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
728 schemes are offered.
729
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000730- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
731
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000732- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
733 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
734 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
735
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000736- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
737
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000738- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
739 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
740
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000741- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
742 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
743 when dummy_threading is being used.
744
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000745- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
746 from a tarfile.
747
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000748- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000749 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000750
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000751- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
752 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
753 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
754 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
755
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000756- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
757 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
758
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000759- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
760 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
761 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
762 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
763 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
764 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
765 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
766 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
767 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
768 by some other method in progress).
769
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000770- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
771 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
772 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000773
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000774- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
775
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000776- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
777 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
778 AM Kuchling.
779
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000780- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
781 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
782 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
783
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000784- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
785 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
786 instead of unsigned.
787
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000788- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000789 no longer part of the public API.
790
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000791- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
792 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
793 string methods of the same name).
794
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000795- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000796 SF patch 945642.
797
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000798- doctest unittest integration improvements:
799
800 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
801
802 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
803 DocTestSuites.
804
805- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
806 that provide thread-local data.
807
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000808- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
809 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
810
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000811- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
812
813- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
814 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
815 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
816
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000817- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
818
819 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
820 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
821 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000822
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000823 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
824 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
825 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
826 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
827
828 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
829 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
830
831 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
832 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
833 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
834 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
835
836 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
837 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
838 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
839 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
840 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
841
842 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
843 wrapping help output.
844
845 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
846 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
847 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000848
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000849C API
850-----
851
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000852- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
853 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
854 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
855 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
856 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
857 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
858 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
859 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
860 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
861 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
862 its visible semantics have not changed.
863
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000864- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
865 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
866
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000867Documentation
868-------------
869
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000870- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000871
872 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000873 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000874
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000875 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000876
877 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
878
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000879- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000880
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000881Tests
882-----
883
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000884- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000885 platforms that use the Makefile.
886
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000887- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
888 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
889 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
890
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000891
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000892What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
893=================================
894
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000895*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000896
897Core and builtins
898-----------------
899
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000900- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
901 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
902 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
903 objects now (one object instead of three).
904
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000905- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
906 Windows DLLs.
907
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000908- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
909 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000910
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000911- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
912 a new .pyc magic.
913
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000914- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
915 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
916 be there.
917
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000918- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
919 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
920 the LC_NUMERIC category.
921
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000922- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
923 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
924 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
925
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000926- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
927
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000928- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
929 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
930 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000931
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000932- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
933 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
934
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000935- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
936
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000937- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000938 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000939
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000940- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
941
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000942- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
943
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000944- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
945 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
946
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000947- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
948 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
949 Fixes bug #858016 .
950
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000951- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
952 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
953 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
954
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000955- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
956 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
957 improves their performance (about 35%).
958
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000959- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
960 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
961 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
962
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000963- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
964 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
965 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
966 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
967
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000968- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
969 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
970 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
971 length is not known).
972
973- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
974 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000975 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
976 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000977 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
978
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000979- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
980 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
981
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000982- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
983 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
984 keyword arguments.
985
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000986- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
987 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
988 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
989
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000990- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
991 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
992 cases.
993
994- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
995 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
996 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
997 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
998 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
999 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1000 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1001 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1002 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1003 a release build.
1004
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001005- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1006 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1007
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001008- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001009 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001010
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001011- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1012 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1013 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1014 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1015 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1016 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1017 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1018 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1019 destroyed.
1020
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001021- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1022 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1023 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1024 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1025 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1026 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1027 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1028 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1029
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001030- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1031 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1032 character other than a space.
1033
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001034- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1035 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1036 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1037 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1038 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1039 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1040 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1041 attributes with the same name.
1042
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001043- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1044 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1045 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1046 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1047 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1048 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1049 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1050 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1051 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1052 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1053 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1054 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1055 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1056 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001057
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001058- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1059 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1060 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1061 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1062 This has been repaired.
1063
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001064- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1065
1066- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1067
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001068- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1069 over a sequence.
1070
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001071- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001072 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001073
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001074- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1075
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001076- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1077 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1078 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1079 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1080 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1081 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1082 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1083 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1084
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001085- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1086 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1087 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1088
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001089- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1090 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1091 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1092 freelist.
1093
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001094- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1095 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1096
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001097- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1098 number.
1099
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001100- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1101 a TypeError exception.
1102
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001103- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1104 820195.
1105
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001106- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1107 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1108 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1109
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001110- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001111 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1112 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001113
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001114- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1115 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1116 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1117
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001118- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1119 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001120 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001121
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001122- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001123 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1124 the first call.
1125
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001126
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001127Extension modules
1128-----------------
1129
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001130- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1131 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1132
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001133- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1134 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1135 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1136 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1137 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1138 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1139 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001140
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001141- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1142
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001143- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1144
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001145- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1146 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1147
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001148- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1149 fewer false positives.
1150
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001151- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1152 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1153
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001154- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001155 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1156
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001157- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001158 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001159 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001160 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1161 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001162
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001163- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1164 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1165 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1166 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1167
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001168- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1169 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1170 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1171 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1172 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1173 #897625.
1174
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001175- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1176 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1177
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001178- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1179 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1180 and pops on either side of the deque.
1181
1182- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1183 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1184
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001185- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1186 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1187 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1188 other functions that expect a function argument.
1189
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001190- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1191
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001192- os.getsid was added.
1193
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001194- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1195 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1196 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1197
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001198- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1199
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001200- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1201
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001202- readline.clear_history was added.
1203
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001204- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1205
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001206- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1207
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001208- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1209
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001210- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1211
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001212- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1213
1214- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1215
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001216- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1217
1218- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1219
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001220- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1221 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1222 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1223
1224- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1225 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1226 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1227 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1228 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1229 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1230 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1231
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001232- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1233 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1234 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1235 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001236
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001237- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001238 iterators from a single iterable.
1239
1240- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1241 of raising a TypeError exception.
1242
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001243- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1244 as parameter.
1245
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001246Library
1247-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001248
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001249- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1250 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1251 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001252
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001253- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1254 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1255 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001256
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001257- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001258
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001259- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1260 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001261
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001262- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1263 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1264
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001265- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1266
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001267- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001268 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001269
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001270- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001271 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001272
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001273- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1274
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001275- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1276 on cygwin and mingw32.
1277
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001278- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1279
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001280- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1281 module.
1282
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001283- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1284 installation scheme for all platforms.
1285
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001286- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001287 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001288
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001289- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1290 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1291 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1292
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001293- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1294 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1295 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1296
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001297- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1298
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001299- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1300
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001301- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1302 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1303
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001304- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1305 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1306 type pattern with the same value exists.
1307
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001308- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1309 when run from the command prompt).
1310
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001311- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1312 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1313
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001314- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1315 default sort).
1316
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001317- Added global runctx function to profile module
1318
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001319- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1320
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001321- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1322
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001323- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1324
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001325- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001326 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1327 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1328 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1329 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1330 accordingly.
1331
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001332- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1333 decoding standards.
1334
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001335- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1336 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1337 called for all requests.
1338
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001339- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1340 they are passed to the compiler.
1341
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001342- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1343 indent, width and depth.
1344
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001345- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1346 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1347
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001348- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1349 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1350
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001351- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1352
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001353- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1354
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001355- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1356
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001357- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1358 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1359
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001360- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001361 for better performance.
1362
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001363- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001364
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001365- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1366 a string).
1367
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001368- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1369
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001370- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1371
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001372- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1373
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001374- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1375
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001376- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1377 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1378 list of fieldnames.
1379
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001380- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1381 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1382
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001383- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1384
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001385- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1386 empty lists.
1387
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001388- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1389 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1390 and shelves.
1391
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001392- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1393 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1394
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001395- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001396 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1397 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001398
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001399- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1400 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001401 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001402
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001403- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001404 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1405 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1406
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001407- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1408 and removed in Py2.4.
1409
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001410- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1411
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001412- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1413
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001414Tools/Demos
1415-----------
1416
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001417- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1418 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1419
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001420- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1421
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001422- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1423 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1424 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1425 destination in situations where both files are given.
1426
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001427- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1428 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1429 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1430 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1431
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001432- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1433
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001434- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1435 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1436 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1437 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1438 now.
1439
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001440- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1441 in effect
1442
1443- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1444 C-c C-h
1445
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001446- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1447 -d option was given.
1448
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001449Build
1450-----
1451
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001452- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1453 build under OS X.
1454
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001455- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1456 --enable-profiling.
1457
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001458- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1459 is configured --with-tsc.
1460
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001461- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1462 on AMD64.
1463
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001464- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1465 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1466
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001467- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1468 removed.
1469
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001470- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1471 supported (see PEP 11).
1472
1473- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1474
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001475- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1476
1477- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1478 (see PEP 11).
1479
1480- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1481 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1482
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001483C API
1484-----
1485
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001486- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1487 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1488 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1489
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001490- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1491 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1492 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1493 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1494
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001495- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1496 generator objects.
1497
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001498- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1499 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001500 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1501 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001502
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001503- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1504 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1505
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001506- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1507 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1508 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1509 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1510 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1511
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001512- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1513 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1514 about 10% faster.
1515
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001516- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1517 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1518
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001519- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1520 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1521 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1522 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1523
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001524Windows
1525-------
1526
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001527- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1528 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1529 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1530 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1531
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001532- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1533 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1534 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1535
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001536
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001537What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1538===============================
1539
1540*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1541
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001542IDLE
1543----
1544
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001545- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1546 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1547 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1548 context-menu actions.
1549
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001550- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1551 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1552 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1553 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1554 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1555 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1556 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1557 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1558 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1559
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001560
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001561What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1562=============================================
1563
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001564*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001565
1566Core and builtins
1567-----------------
1568
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001569- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001570 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001571 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1572
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001573Extension modules
1574-----------------
1575
1576- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1577 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1578 than once. This has been fixed.
1579
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001580- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1581 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1582 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1583 call.
1584
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001585- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1586
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001587Library
1588-------
1589
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001590- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1591 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1592
1593- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1594 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1595 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1596 restored.
1597
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001598IDLE
1599----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001600
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001601- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001602
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001603Build
1604-----
1605
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001606- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1607 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1608
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001609C API
1610-----
1611
1612Windows
1613-------
1614
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001615- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1616 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1617
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001618- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1619
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001620Mac
1621---
1622
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001623- Various fixes to pimp.
1624
1625- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1626
1627- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1628 more problems than it solves.
1629
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001630
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001631What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1632=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001633
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001634*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1635
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001636Core and builtins
1637-----------------
1638
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001639- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1640 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1641
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001642- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1643 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001644 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001645
1646- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1647 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1648 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001649 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001650
1651- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1652 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001653
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001654- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1655 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1656 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1657
1658- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001659 770247.
1660
1661- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001662
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001663Extension modules
1664-----------------
1665
1666- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1667 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1668
1669- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1670
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001671- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1672
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001673- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1674 contained within the _strptime module.
1675
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001676- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1677 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1678
1679- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001680 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1681
1682- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1683 the find_class attribute, if present.
1684
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001685- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001686
1687 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1688 (SF bug 763298).
1689
1690 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001691 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1692 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1693 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001694
1695 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1696
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001697Library
1698-------
1699
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001700- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1701
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001702- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1703 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1704 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1705 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1706 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1707 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1708 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1709 or Tester().
1710
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001711- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1712 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1713 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1714 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1715 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1716 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1717 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1718 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1719 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001720
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001721 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001722
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001723- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1724 weren't before was an oversight.
1725
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001726- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1727 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1728
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001729- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1730 when there are no lines.
1731
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001732- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1733 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1734
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001735- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1736 to child processes.
1737
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001738- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1739
1740- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1741
1742- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1743 xmlrpclib.
1744
1745- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1746 responses.
1747
1748- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1749 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1750
1751- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1752 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1753 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1754
1755- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1756 used as patterns.
1757
1758- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1759 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1760 than Tk 8.3.
1761
1762- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1763
1764- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001765
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001766Tools/Demos
1767-----------
1768
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001769- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1770
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001771- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1772
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001773- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001774
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001775Build
1776-----
1777
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001778- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1779
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001780- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1781
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001782- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1783 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001784
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001785- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1786 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1787 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001788
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001789C API
1790-----
1791
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001792- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1793 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1794
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001795Windows
1796-------
1797
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001798- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1799 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1800 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1801 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1802 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1803 Python exception ::
1804
1805 thread.error: can't start new thread
1806
1807 is raised now.
1808
1809- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1810 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1811 instead of from DLL teardown.
1812
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001813Mac
1814---
1815
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001816- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001817 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001818 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1819 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1820 the executable in the bundle.
1821
1822- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001823
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001824- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1825
1826- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1827 on Panther.
1828
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001829What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1830================================
1831
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001832*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001833
1834Core and builtins
1835-----------------
1836
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001837- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1838 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1839 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1840 with the -i option.
1841
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001842- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1843 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1844
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001845- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1846 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1847
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001848- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1849 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1850 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1851 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1852 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1853 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1854 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1855 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1856 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1857 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1858 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1859 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1860 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001861
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001862- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1863 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1864 embedded in a lambda expression.
1865
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001866- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1867 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1868 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1869 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1870 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1871
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001872- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1873 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1874 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1875
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001876- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1877 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1878
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001879- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1880 It's writable again.
1881
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001882- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1883 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1884 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001885 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001886
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001887- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1888 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1889 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1890
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001891Extension modules
1892-----------------
1893
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001894- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1895 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1896
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001897- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1898 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1899 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1900 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1901
1902- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1903 collection.
1904
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001905- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1906 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1907 unique within a single program run.
1908
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001909- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1910 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1911
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001912- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1913 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1914
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001915- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1916 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001917
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001918- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1919
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001920- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1921 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1922
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001923- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1924 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1925 for many BSD-derived systems.
1926
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001927
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001928Library
1929-------
1930
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001931- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1932 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1933 primary ones:
1934
1935 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1936 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1937 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1938
1939 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1940 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1941 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1942 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1943 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1944 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1945
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001946- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1947 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1948 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1949 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1950 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1951 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1952 argument.
1953
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001954- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1955 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1956 in the archive.
1957
1958- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1959 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1960
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001961- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1962 569574).
1963
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001964- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1965 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1966 no more.
1967
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001968- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1969 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1970 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1971 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1972 code coverage.
1973
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001974- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1975 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1976 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001977 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1978 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001979
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001980- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1981 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1982 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001983 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001984
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001985- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1986
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001987- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1988 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1989 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1990 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1991
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001992- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1993 handling.
1994
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001995- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1996 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1997
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001998- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1999 in socket.py.
2000
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002001- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2002
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002003- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2004 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2005 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2006 opener with proxy support.
2007
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002008- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2009
2010- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2011
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002012Tools/Demos
2013-----------
2014
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002015- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2016
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002017- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2018
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002019- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2020 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002021
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002022- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2023 files.
2024
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002025Build
2026-----
2027
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002028- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002029 different root directory.
2030
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002031C API
2032-----
2033
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002034- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2035 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2036 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2037 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2038 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2039 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2040 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2041 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2042 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2043 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2044
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002045- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2046 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2047 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2048 from Python.
2049
2050
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002051New platforms
2052-------------
2053
2054None this time.
2055
2056Tests
2057-----
2058
2059- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2060 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2061
2062Windows
2063-------
2064
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002065- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2066
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002067- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2068 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2069 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2070 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2071 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2072 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2073 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2074 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2075 that's what it's for.
2076
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002077Mac
2078---
2079
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002080- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2081 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2082 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2083 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002084- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2085 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2086- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002087
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002088SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2089------------------------------------
2090
2091430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2092598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2093622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2094661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2095683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2096697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2097713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2098724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2099727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2100729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2101730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2102731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2103732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2104733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2105735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2106740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2107744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2108745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2109747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2110749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2111751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2112753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2113755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2114757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2115760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2116
2117
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002118What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2119================================
2120
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002121*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002122
2123Core and builtins
2124-----------------
2125
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002126- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2127 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2128
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002129- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2130 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2131 and cannot be strings).
2132
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002133- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2134 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2135 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2136 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2137
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002138- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2139 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2140 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2141 Python itself.
2142
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002143- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2144 the referenced object, if it has one.
2145
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002146- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2147 the thread started at
2148 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2149
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002150- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2151 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2152 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2153 placed on a list index.
2154
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002155- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2156 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2157 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2158 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2159
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002160- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2161 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2162 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2163 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2164 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2165 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2166 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2167
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002168- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2169 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2170 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2171 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2172 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2173
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002174- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2175 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002176
2177- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2178 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2179 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2180 #693195.)
2181
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002182- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2183 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002184
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002185- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002186 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002187 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2188 interpreter executions, would fail.
2189
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002190- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002191 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002192 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002193
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002194Extension modules
2195-----------------
2196
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002197- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2198 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2199 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2200 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2201
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002202- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2203 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2204
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002205- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2206 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2207 and Greg Chapman.)
2208
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002209- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2210 recursively.
2211
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002212- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002213 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2214 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2215 leaks.
2216
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002217- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2218
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002219- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2220 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2221 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2222 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2223 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2224 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2225 #705836.
2226
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002227- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002228 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2229
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002230- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2231 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2232 See SF bug #692416.
2233
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002234- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2235 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2236
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002237- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2238 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2239 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002240
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002241- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002242 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2243 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2244
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002245- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2246 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2247 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2248 timeouts to work properly.
2249
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002250Library
2251-------
2252
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002253- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2254 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2255 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2256 future release.
2257
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002258- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2259 for querying platform dependent features.
2260
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002261- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002262
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002263- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2264 pickle protocol versions.
2265
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002266- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2267 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2268 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2269
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002270- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2271
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002272- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2273 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2274 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2275 modules.
2276
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002277- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2278 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2279 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2280
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002281- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2282 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2283
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002284- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2285 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2286 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2287
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002288- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002289 MS Office extensions.
2290
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002291- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2292 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2293
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002294- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2295 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2296
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002297- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2298 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2299 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2300 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2301 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2302 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2303
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002304- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2305 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2306 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002307
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002308- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2309 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2310 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2311
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002312- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2313
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002314- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2315 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2316 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2317
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002318Tools/Demos
2319-----------
2320
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002321- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2322 See the module docstring for details.
2323
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002324Build
2325-----
2326
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002327- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2328 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002329
2330C API
2331-----
2332
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002333- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2334
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002335- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2336 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2337 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2338
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002339- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2340 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002341
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002342 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2343 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2344 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002345
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002346- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002347 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2348
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002349- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2350 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2351 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002352
2353New platforms
2354-------------
2355
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002356None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002357
2358Tests
2359-----
2360
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002361- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2362 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002363
2364Windows
2365-------
2366
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002367- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2368 function.
2369
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002370- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2371 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002372
2373Mac
2374---
2375
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002376- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2377 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002378
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002379- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2380 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002381
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002382- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2383 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2384 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002385
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002386- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002387 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2388 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002389
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002390- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2391 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002392
2393
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002394What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2395=================================
2396
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002397*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002398
2399Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002400-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002401
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002402- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2403 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2404 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2405
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002406- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2407 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2408 (SF patch #664376.)
2409
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002410- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2411 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2412 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2413 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2414 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2415 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002416 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002417
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002418- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2419 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2420 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2421 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002422 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002423
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002424- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2425 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2426 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2427 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2428 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2429 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2430 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2431 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2432 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2433 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2434 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2435
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002436- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2437 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2438 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2439 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2440 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2441 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2442
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002443- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2444 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2445
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002446- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2447 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2448 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2449 case.)
2450
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002451- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2452 passed as unicode strings.
2453
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002454- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2455 See SF bug #683467.
2456
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002457- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2458 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2459
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002460- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2461
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002462- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2463
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002464- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2465 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2466 arguments.
2467
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002468- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2469 See SF bug #667147.
2470
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002471- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002472 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002473 See SF bug #676155.
2474
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002475- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002476 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002477 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2478 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2479 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2480 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2481 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2482 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002483
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002484Extension modules
2485-----------------
2486
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002487- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2488 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2489 tp_as_number pointer.
2490
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002491- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2492 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2493 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2494 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2495 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2496
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002497- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2498
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002499- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2500
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002501- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002502 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002503 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2504 patch #678531.)
2505
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002506- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2507 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2508
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002509- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2510 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2511
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002512- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2513
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002514- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2515 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2516 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2517
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002518- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2519
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002520- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2521 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2522
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002523- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002524
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002525- datetime changes:
2526
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002527 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2528
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002529 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2530 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2531 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2532 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2533 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2534 now.
2535
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002536 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002537 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2538 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002539
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002540 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002541 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002542 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2543 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2544 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2545 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002546
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002547 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2548 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2549 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002550 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2551
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002552 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2553 by a later example coded by Guido.
2554
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002555 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002556 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2557 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2558 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002559 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2560 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2561
2562 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2563 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2564 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2565 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2566 tzinfo subclass instance.
2567
2568 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2569 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2570 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2571 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2572 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2573 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2574 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2575 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002576
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002577 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2578 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2579 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2580 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2581 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002582 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2583
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002584 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002585
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002586 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2587 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2588 as a naive datetime object.
2589
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002590 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2591 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2592 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2593
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002594 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2595 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2596 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2597 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2598 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2599 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2600 comparison.
2601
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002602 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2603 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2604 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2605 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002606 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002607
2608 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002609
2610 and ::
2611
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002612 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2613
2614 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2615 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2616 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2617 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2618
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002619 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2620 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2621 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2622 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2623 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2624
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002625 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2626 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002627 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2628 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002629
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002630Library
2631-------
2632
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002633- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2634 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2635
2636- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2637 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2638 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2639 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2640 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2641 See PEP 307 for details.
2642
2643- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2644 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2645
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002646- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2647 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002648 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002649 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2650 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002651 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002652
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002653- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2654 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2655
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002656- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2657 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2658 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2659
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002660- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2661
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002662- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2663 exception.
2664
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002665- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2666 class.
2667
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002668- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2669 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2670 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2671
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002672- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2673 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2674
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002675- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002676 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2677 See SF bug #659228.
2678
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002679- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2680 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2681 See SF patch #651082.
2682
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002683- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002684
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002685- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2686 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2687
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002688- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002689 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002690
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002691- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2692 DOS paths from other platforms.
2693
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002694Tools/Demos
2695-----------
2696
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002697- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2698 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2699 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2700 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2701 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2702 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2703 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2704 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2705 example:
2706
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002707 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2708 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002709
2710 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2711
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002712
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002713Build
2714-----
2715
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002716- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2717 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2718 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002719 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2720
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002721 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2722
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002723- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2724 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2725 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2726 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2727 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2728 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2729 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2730 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2731 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2732
2733- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2734 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2735 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2736 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2737
2738- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2739 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2740
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002741C API
2742-----
2743
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002744- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2745 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002746
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002747- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2748 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2749 tp_as_number pointer.
2750
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002751- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2752 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2753 (SF #681367)
2754
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002755- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2756 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2757 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2758 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002759
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002760Tests
2761-----
2762
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002763- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002764 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2765 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2766 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2767 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2768 pydoc.)
2769
2770- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2771
2772- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002773
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002774Windows
2775-------
2776
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002777- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2778 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2779 time).
2780
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002781- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2782 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2783
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002784- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2785 release without strong cryptography.
2786
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002787- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002788 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002789
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002790- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2791 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2792
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002793Mac
2794---
2795
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002796- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2797 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002798
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002799- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2800 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2801 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002802
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002803- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2804 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002805
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002806- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2807 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2808 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2809 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002810
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002811- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002812 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2813 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2814 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002815
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002816
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002817What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002818=================================
2819
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002820*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002821
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002822Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002823--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002824
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002825- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2826
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002827- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2828 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002829 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002830 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002831 a different meaning than before.
2832
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002833- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002834 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002835 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002836
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002837- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002838 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002839 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002840
2841- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2842 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2843 and deallocation.
2844
2845- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2846 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2847
2848- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2849 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2850 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2851 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2852 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2853
2854- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2855 now detected by the garbage collector.
2856
2857- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2858 [SF bug 519621]
2859
2860- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2861 identifier.
2862
2863- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2864 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2865 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2866 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2867 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2868 [SF bug 563060]
2869
2870- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2871 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2872 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2873 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2874 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2875
2876- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2877 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2878 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2879
2880- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2881
2882- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2883 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2884 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2885 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2886 state of the slots would be lost.)
2887
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002888Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002889-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002890
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002891- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002892 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2893 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2894 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2895 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002896 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2897 Jython 2.1.
2898
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002899- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002900 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002901 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2902 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2903 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2904 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2905 these, see PEP 302.
2906
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002907- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2908 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2909 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2910
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002911- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2912 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2913 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2914
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002915- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2916 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2917 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2918
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002919- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2920 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2921 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2922 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2923 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2924 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2925 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2926 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2927 releases or implementations.
2928
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002929- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002930 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2931 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002932
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002933- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2934 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2935
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002936- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2937 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2938 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2939
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002940- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2941 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2942
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002943- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2944 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002945 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2946 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002947
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002948- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2949 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2950 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2951 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2952 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2953
2954 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2955 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2956 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2957 pattern.
2958
2959 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2960 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2961 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2962 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2963
2964 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2965 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2966 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2967 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2968 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2969 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2970
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002971- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2972 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2973 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2974 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2975 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2976 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2977 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2978 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002979
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002980- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2981 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2982 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2983 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2984 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002985 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2986 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2987 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2988 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2989 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2990 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2991 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002992
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002993- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2994 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2995
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002996- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2997 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2998 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2999 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3000 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3001 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3002 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3003 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3004 to Zack Weinberg!
3005
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003006- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3007 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3008 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3009 type. This has been fixed now.
3010
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003011- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3012 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3013 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3014
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003015- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3016 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3017 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3018 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3019 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3020 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3021 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3022 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003023 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003024
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003025- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3026 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3027 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003028
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003029- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3030 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3031 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3032 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3033 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3034 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3035 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3036 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003037 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003038 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3039 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3040
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003041- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3042 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3043 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3044 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3045 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3046 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3047 this.)
3048
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003049- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3050 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003051 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003052 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003053 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3054 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003055 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3056 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003057
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003058- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3059 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3060 currently running.
3061
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003062- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3063 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3064 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3065 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3066
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003067- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3068 as directory names.
3069
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003070- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3071 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3072
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003073- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3074 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3075
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003076- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003077 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3078 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003079
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003080- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3081 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3082 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3083 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3084 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3085
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003086- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3087 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3088 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3089 removed.
3090
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003091- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3092 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3093 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3094
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003095- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3096 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3097 to __debug__.
3098
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003099- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3100 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3101 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3102
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003103- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3104 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3105 deprecated now.
3106
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003107- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3108 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3109 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003110
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003111- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3112 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3113 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3114 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3115 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003116
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003117- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3118 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3119
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003120- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3121 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3122 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003123 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003124 is backward compatible.
3125
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003126- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3127 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3128 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3129 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3130 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3131
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003132- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3133 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3134 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3135 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3136 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3137 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003138
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003139- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3140 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3141
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003142- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3143 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3144
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003145- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3146 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3147 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3148 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3149 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3150
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003151- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3152 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3153 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3154
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003155- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003156 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3157
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003158- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3159 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3160 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003161
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003162- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3163 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3164
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003165- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3166 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3167 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3168
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003169- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3170
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003171Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003173
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003174- Added three operators to the operator module:
3175 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3176 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3177 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3178
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003179- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3180
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003181- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3182 archives.
3183
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003184- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3185 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3186 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3187
3188 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3189
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003190- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3191 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3192 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003193 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003194
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003195- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3196 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3197 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3198 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003199 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3200 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3201 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3202 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003203
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003204- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3205 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003206
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003207- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3208
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003209- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3210 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3211
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003212- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3213 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3214 supported.
3215
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003216- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3217
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003218- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3219 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003220
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003221- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3222 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3223
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003224- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3225
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003226- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3227 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3228
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003229- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3230 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3231 functions but callable type objects.
3232
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003233- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003234 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003235 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003236
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003237- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3238 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003239
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003240- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3241 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003242
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003243- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3244 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3245 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3246 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3247
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003248- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3249 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003250
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003251- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3252 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3253 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3254 and __imul__.
3255
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003256- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003257 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3258 is called.
3259
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003260- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3261 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3262 interpreter was compiled.
3263
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003264- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3265 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3266 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003267 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003268 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3269 1, not 2.
3270
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003271- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3272 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3273 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3274 limit.
3275
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003276- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3277 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3278 bug #623464.
3279
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003280- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3281 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3282 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3283 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3284
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003285Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003286-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003287
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003288- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3289
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003290- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3291 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3292 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3293 with Python 2.3a2.
3294
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003295- os.path exposes getctime.
3296
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003297- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003298 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003299 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003300 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003301 unit tests of floating point results.
3302
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003303- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3304 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3305 has been increased.
3306
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003307- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3308 executed.
3309
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003310- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3311 postinstallation script.
3312
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003313- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3314 test the current module.
3315
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003316- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003317 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3318 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3319 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3320 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3321
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003322- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003323 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003324 Ward's Optik package.
3325
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003326- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3327 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3328 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3329 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3330
3331- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3332 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003333 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003334
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003335- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3336 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3337 shelf are binary pickles.
3338
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003339- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3340 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3341
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003342- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3343 modules are iterators now.
3344
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003345- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3346 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3347 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3348 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3349 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3350 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003351
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003352- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3353 with their entity value.
3354
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003355- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3356
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003357- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3358 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003359
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003360- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3361 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003362 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003363
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003364- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3365 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3366 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3367 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3368 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3369 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3370 main():
3371
3372 import locale
3373 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3374
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003375- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3376 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3377
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003378- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3379 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3380 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3381 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3382 to the new standard.
3383
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003384- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3385 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3386 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3387 an extension to the database.
3388
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003389- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3390 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3391 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3392 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003393 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003394
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003395- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003396 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003397
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003398- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3399 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3400 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3401 bounded integers.
3402
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003403- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3404 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3405 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3406 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3407 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3408 in existence.
3409
3410 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3411 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3412 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3413 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3414 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3415 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3416
3417 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3418 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3419 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3420 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3421
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003422- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3423 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3424 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3425
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003426- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3427
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003428- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3429 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3430 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3431 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3432
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003433- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3434 argument.
3435
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003436- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3437 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3438 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3439 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3440 [SF patch 560794].
3441
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003442- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3443 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3444 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003445 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3446 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3447 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003448
3449- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3450 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003451
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003452- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3453 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3454 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3455 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003456
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003457- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3458 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3459 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3460 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3461 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3462
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003463- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003464
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003465- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3466
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003467- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3468 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3469 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3470 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3471 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3472 identical to None.
3473
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003474- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3475 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3476 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3477 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3478 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3479 results now.
3480
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003481- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3482 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3483
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003484- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3485 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3486 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3487 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3488 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3489 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3490 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3491 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3492
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003493- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3494
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003495- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3496 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3497
3498- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3499 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3500 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3501 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3502 and other systems.
3503
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003504- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3505 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3506 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3507 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 +00003508 work well with these.
3509
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003510- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3511
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003512- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003513 connections.
3514
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003515- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3516 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3517 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3518
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003519- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3520 sets
3521
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003522- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3523 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3524 name.
3525
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003526- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3527 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3528 passed in.
3529
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003530- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003531 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003532 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3533 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003534
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003535- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3536
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003537- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3538
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003539- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3540 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3541 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3542
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003543- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3544 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3545 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3546 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003547 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003548
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003549- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003550 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003551 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003552
3553- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3554 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3555 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3556
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003557- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003558 the value of its expression argument.
3559
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003560- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3561 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3562 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3563
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003564- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3565 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3566 skipstone browser was included.
3567
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003568- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3569 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3570
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003571Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003572-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003573
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003574- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3575 names in addition to accepting file names.
3576
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003577- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3578 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3579 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3580 still used and useful.)
3581
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003582- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3583 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3584 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3585 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003586
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003587- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3588 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3589 the generated binary.
3590
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003591Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003593
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003594- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3595
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003596- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3597 except in the hands of experts.
3598
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003599- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003600 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3601 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3602 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003603
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003604- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3605 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3606 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3607 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3608 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3609 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3610 builds.
3611
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003612- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3613 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3614 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3615 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3616 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3617 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3618 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3619 new type.
3620
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003621- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003622
3623 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3624 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3625 positive infinities.
3626
3627 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3628 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3629 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3630 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3631 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3632 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3633 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3634
3635 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3636
3637 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3638
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003639- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3640 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3641 size of the executable.
3642
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003643- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3644 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3645 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3646 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003647
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003648- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3649
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003650- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3651 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3652 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003653
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003654- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3655 well as Unix.
3656
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003657- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3658 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3659 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3660 modules in the README file for details.
3661
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003662C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003663-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003664
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003665- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3666 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003667 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003668 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003669 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003670
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003671- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3672 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3673 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3674 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3675 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3676 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003677 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003678 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3679 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3680 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3681 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3682 aligned.)
3683
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003684- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3685 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3686 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3687
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003688- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3689 level.
3690
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003691- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3692 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3693 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3694 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3695 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3696
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003697- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3698 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3699 code.
3700
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003701- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3702 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3703 adjusting for negative indices.
3704
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003705- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3706 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3707 object.
3708
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003709- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3710 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3711 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3712
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003713- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3714 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003715
3716- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3717
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003718- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3719 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3720 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3721 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3722
3723- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3724
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003725- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003726
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003727- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003728 without going through the buffer API.
3729
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003731
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003732- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3733 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3734 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3735 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3736
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003737- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3738 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3739
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003740- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003741 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3742
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003743New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003745
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003746- OpenVMS is now supported.
3747
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003748- AtheOS is now supported.
3749
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003750- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3751
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003752- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3753
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003754Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----
3756
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003757- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3758 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3759 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003760
3761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003763
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003764- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3765 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3766 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3767 bugs.
3768 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003769 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003770 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3771 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003772 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003773
3774- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003775 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003776
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003777- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3778 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3779
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003780- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3781 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003782 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003783 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3784
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003785- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3786 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3787 use files" uninstall option).
3788
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003789- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3790
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003791- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3792 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3793
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003794- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3795 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3796 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3797
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003798- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3799 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3800 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3801 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3802 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003803 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3804 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3805 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003806
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003807- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003808 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003809 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3810 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3811 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3812 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3813 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3814 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3815 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3816 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3817 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3818 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3819 work around.
3820
3821- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3822 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3823 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3824 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3825 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3826 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3827 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3828 specified with O_CREAT too).
3829
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003830Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831----
3832
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003833- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003834
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003835- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3836 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3837 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3838
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003839- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3840 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3841 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3842
3843- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3844 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3845 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3846 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3847 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3848 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3849 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3850 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003851
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003852- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3853 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3854 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003855
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003856- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3857 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3858 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3859 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3860 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003861
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003862- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3863 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3864 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003865
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003866- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3867 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003868
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003869- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3870 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3871 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3872 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3873 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003874
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003875- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3876 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3877 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3878
3879- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3880 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3881 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003882
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003883- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3884 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3885 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3886 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003887 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003889- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3890 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003891
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003892- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3893 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003894
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003895- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003896 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003897 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3898 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003899
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003900
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003901What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003902===============================
3903
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003904*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3905
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003906Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003908
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003909- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3910 with a custom metaclass.
3911
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003912Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003914
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003915- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3916 are proxies.
3917
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003918Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003919-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003920
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003921- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3922 very short strings.
3923
3924- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3925 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3926 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3927 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3928 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3929
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003930Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003932
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003933- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3934 close or delete time).
3935
3936- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3937 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3938
3939- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3940
3941- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003942 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003943
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003944Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003945-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003946
3947Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003949
3950C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003952
3953New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003955
3956Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003957-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003958
3959Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003961
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003962- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3963
3964- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3965 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3966
3967- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3968 deleted at process exit time.
3969
3970- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3971 in backslash.
3972
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003973Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003975
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003976- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3977 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3978 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3979
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003980
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003981What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003982===========================
3983
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3985
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003986Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003988
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003989- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3990 been extensively updated. See
3991
3992 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3993
3994 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3995
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003996- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3997 deleted!
3998
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003999- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4000 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4001 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4002 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4003 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4004
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004005- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4006
4007 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4008 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4009
4010 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4011 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4012 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4013 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4014 supported anyway.
4015
4016 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4017 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4018
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004019- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4020 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4021 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4022 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4023 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004024
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004025- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4026 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4027 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4028
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004029Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004031
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004032- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4033 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4034 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4035 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4036 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4037 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004038 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4039 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4040 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4041 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004042
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004043- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4044 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4045 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4046
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004047Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004049
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004050- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4051
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004052Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004053-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004054
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004055- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4056 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4057 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4058 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4059 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4060 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4061
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004062- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4063
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004064- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4065
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004066- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4067
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004068- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4069 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4070 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4071
4072- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4073
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004074Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004076
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004077- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4078 off a search on Google.
4079
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004080Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004082
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004083- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4084 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4085 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4086 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4087 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4088 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4089 other platforms should do likewise.
4090
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004091- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4092 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4093 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4094
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004095C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004097
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004098- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4099 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4100 producing key-value pairs.
4101
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004102- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004103 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004104 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4105 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4106 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4107 previously went unchallenged.
4108
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004109New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004111
4112Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004114
4115Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004117
4118Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004120
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004121- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4122 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004123
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004124- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4125 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4126 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4127 home.
4128
4129
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004130What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004131===========================
4132
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4134
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004135Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004136--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004137
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004138- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4139 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004140
4141 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004142 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004143
4144 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4145 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004146 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004147 This needs to be documented.
4148
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004149- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4150 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4151
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004152- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4153 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4154 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4155
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004156- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4157 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4158
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004159- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4160 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4161 class forbids it).
4162
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004163- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4164 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4165 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4166
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004167- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4168
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004169Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004171
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004172- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4173 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004174 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004175
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004176- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4177 (like 1 + '').
4178
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004179Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004181
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004182- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4183 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4184 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4185 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004186 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004187 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4188
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004189- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4190 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4191 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4192 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4193
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004194- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4195 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004196 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4197 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4198 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004199
4200- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4201 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004202
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004203- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4204 bytes on its input.
4205
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004206Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004208
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004209- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004210 convenience function.
4211
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004212- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4213 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4214 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004215 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4216 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4217 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4218 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4219 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4220 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004221
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004222- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4223 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4224 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4225 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4226
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004227- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4228 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4229 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4230
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004231- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4232 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4233 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4234 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4235
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004236- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4237 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004239 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4240 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4241 new -l and -e options.
4242
4243- statcache is now deprecated.
4244
4245- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4246 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004248 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4249 time properly taken into account.
4250
4251- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4252 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4253 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4254 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4255
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004256Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004258
4259Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004261
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004262- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4263 is built with libdb3 if available.
4264
4265- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4266
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004267C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004269
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004270- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4271 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4272 PySequence_Size().
4273
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004274- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4275
4276- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4277 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4278 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4279
4280- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4281 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4282
4283- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4284 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4285
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004286New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004288
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004289- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4290 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4291
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004292- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4293 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4294
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004295- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4296
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004297Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004299
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004300- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4301 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4302
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004303Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004305
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004306Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004308
4309- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4310 removed completely in the next release.
4311
4312- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4313 OSX.
4314
4315- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4316 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4317
4318- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4319
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004320
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004321What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004322===========================
4323
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4325
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004326Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004328
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004329- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004330 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004331 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004332 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4333 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004334 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4335 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004336 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4337 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004338
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004339- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4340 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4341
4342- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4343 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4344
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004345Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004347
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004348- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4349 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4350 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4351 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4352 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4353 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4354 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4355 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4356
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004357- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4358 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4359 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4360 example).
4361
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004362- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004363 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004364 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004365 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004366
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004367- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4368 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4369 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004370 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004371
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004372- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4373 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4374 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4375 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4376 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4377 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4378
4379 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4380
4381 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4382
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004383Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004385
4386- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4387
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004388- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4389
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004390- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4391 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004392
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004393- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4394 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4395 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4396 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4397 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4398 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004399 attributes.
4400
4401- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4402 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4403 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004404
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004405- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4406 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4407 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004408
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004409- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4410 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4411 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004412 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4413 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4414
4415- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4416 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004417
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004418Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004420
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004421- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4422 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4423
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004424- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4425 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4426 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4427 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4428
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004429- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4430 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4431 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4432 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4433
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004434 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4435 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4436 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4437 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4438 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4439 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4440 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4441 without losing information).
4442
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004443- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004444 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4445 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4446 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4447 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4448 module).
4449
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004450 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004451 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4452 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4453 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4454 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004455
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004456- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004457 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4458 encoding.
4459
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004460- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4461 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4462
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004464 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4465
4466- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4467 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4468 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4469 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4470
4471- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4472
4473- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4474 ON, and OFF.
4475
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004476- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4477 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4478
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004479Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004480-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004481
4482- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4483 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4484 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004485
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004486- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4487 been added: -X and -E.
4488
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004489Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004490-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004491
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004492- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4493 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4494
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004495C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004497
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004498- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4499 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4500 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4501 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4502 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4503
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004504- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4505 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4506 as long) arguments.
4507
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004508- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4509 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4510 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4511 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4512 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4513 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4514
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004515- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4516 input.
4517
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004518New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004520
4521Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004523
4524Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004526
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004527- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4528 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4529 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4530
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004531- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4532 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4533 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004534 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004535
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4537 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4538 import signal
4539 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004540
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004542 while 1:
4543 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004545 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4546 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4547 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4548 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004549
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004551What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4552===========================
4553
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4555
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004556Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004558
4559- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4560 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4561 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4562
4563- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4564 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4565 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4566 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4567 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4568 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4569 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004570
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004571- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004572 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004573 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4574 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4575 associate a docstring with a property.
4576
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004577- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4578 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4579 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4580 other built-in object types.
4581
4582- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4583 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4584 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4585 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4586 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4587
4588- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4589 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4590
4591- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4592 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004593 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004594 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4595 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4596 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4597 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4598 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4599
4600- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4601 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4602 class.
4603
4604- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4605 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4606 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4607 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4608
4609- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4610 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4611 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4612 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4613
4614- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4615 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4616
4617- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4618 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4619 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4620 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4621 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004622 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004623 with the same value as s.
4624
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004625- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4626
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004627Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004629
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004630- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4631
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004632- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4633 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4634 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4635 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4636 objects.
4637
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004638- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4639 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004640 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4641 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4642
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004643- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4644 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4645 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4646
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004647Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004648-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004649
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004650- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4651 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4652 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4653 by the instances.
4654
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004655- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4656 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4657 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4658
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004659- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4660 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4661 before the entire comparison is complete.
4662
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004663- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4664 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4665 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4666
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004667- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4668 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4669 getwriter().
4670
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004671- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4672 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4673
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004674- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004675 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4676 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4677
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004678- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4679 iterable object.
4680
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004681- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4682 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004683
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004684- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4685 authentication.
4686
4687- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4688 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004689
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004690- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004691 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4692 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4693 a sample driver.)
4694
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004695Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004697
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004698- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4699 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4700 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4701 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4702 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4703 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4704 kernel has large file support.
4705
4706- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4707 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4708 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4709 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4710 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4711
4712- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4713 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4714 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4715
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004716C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004718
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004719- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4720 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4721
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004722New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004724
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004725- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4726 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4727
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004728Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004729-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004730
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004731- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4732 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4733 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4734 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4735 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4736
4737- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4738 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4739 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4740 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4741
4742- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4743 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4744
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004745Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004746-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004747
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004748- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004749 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4750 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004752
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004753What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4754===========================
4755
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004756*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4757
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004758Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004759----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004760
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004761- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4762 big to represent as a C double.
4763
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004764- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4765 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4766 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4767 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4768 restriction).
4769
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004770- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4771 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4772 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4773 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4774 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4775
4776 >>> dir([])
4777 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4778 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4779 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4780 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4781 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4782 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4783 'reverse', 'sort']
4784
4785 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4786
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004787- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004788 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4789 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4790 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4791 OverflowError exception.
4792
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004793- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004794 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004795 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4796 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4797 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4798 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4799 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004800 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004801 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4802 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4803
4804 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4805 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4806 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4807 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004808
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004809- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004810 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4811 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4812 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4813 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4814 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4815 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4816 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4817 once it is created.
4818
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004819- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4820 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4821 (key, value) pairs.
4822
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004823- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004824 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4825 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4826
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004827- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4828 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4829 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4830 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4831 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004832
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004833- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004834 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4835 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4836
4837 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4838
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004839- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004840 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4841
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004842Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004843-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004844
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004845- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004846 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4847 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004848
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004849- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4850 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4851 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4852 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4853 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4854 in this area anymore).
4855
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004856- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4857 threading.Timer.
4858
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004859- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4860 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4861
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004862- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004863 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004865- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004866 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4867 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4868 converted to Python longs.
4869
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004870- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004871 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4872
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004873- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4874 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4875 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4876
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004877Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004879
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004880- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4881 division operators as per PEP 238.
4882
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004883Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004884-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004885
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004886- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4887 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4888 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4889 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4890
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004891C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004892-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004893
4894- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004895
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004896- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4897 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004898 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4901 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004902 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004903 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004904
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004905- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004906 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4907 module:
4908
4909 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004910
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004911 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4912 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004913
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004914 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4915 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004916
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004917 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4918
4919 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4920
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004921- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004922 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4923 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4924 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004925
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004926New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004927-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004928
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004929- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4930 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4931 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4932 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4933 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004934
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004935Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004936-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004937
4938Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004939-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004940
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004941- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4942 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4943 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4944 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004945 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4946 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4947 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4948 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4949 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004950
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004951- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004952 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4953
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004954
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004955What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4956===========================
4957
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4959
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004960Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004961-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004962
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004963- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4964 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4965
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004966- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4967 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4968 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004969
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004970- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4971 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4972 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4973 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004974
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004975- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4976
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004978
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004979Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004980-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004981
4982- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004983 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004984 the module docstring for details.
4985
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004986Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004987-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004988
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004989- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004990 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4991 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4992 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004993
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004994- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4995 Nick Mathewson.
4996
4997Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004999
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005000- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5001 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5002 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5003 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5004 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5005 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5006 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5007 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5008
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005009- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5010 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5011 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5012 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5013
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005014- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5015 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5016 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5017 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5018 come a long way).
5019
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005020- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5021 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5022 write filters for these warnings).
5023
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005024- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5025 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5026 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5027 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5028 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5029
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005030- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5031 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5032 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5033 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5034 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5035 older distribution.
5036
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005037Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005038-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005039
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005040- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5041 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005042 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005043
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005044- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5045 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5046 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5047
5048- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5049
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005050- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5051
5052- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5053
5054- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5055
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005057
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005058- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5059
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005060New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005061-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005062
5063C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005065
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005066- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5067 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5068 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5069 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5070 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5071 against buffer overruns.
5072
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005073- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005074 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5075 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005076 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5077 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5078 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5079
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005080- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5081 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5082 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5083 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5084 deprecated.
5085
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005086Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005087-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005088
5089- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5090 relevant is found.
5091
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005092
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005093What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005094===========================
5095
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5097
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005098Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005100
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005101- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5102 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5103 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5104 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5105 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5106 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5107 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5108 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005109 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005110 repaired.
5111
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005112- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005113 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005114 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5115 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5116 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5117 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5118 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5119 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5120 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5121 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5122
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005123- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5124 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5125 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5126 leading BMO character).
5127
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005128- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5129 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5130 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5131
5132 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5133 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5134 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005135
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005136 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5137 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5138 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5139 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5140 for various simple to use conversions.
5141
5142 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5143 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5144
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005145 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5146 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5147 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5148 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5149 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5150 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5151 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5152 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5153 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5154 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5155 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5156 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5157 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5158 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5159 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005160
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005161- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5162 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5163 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005164 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005165 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005166
5167 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005168 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5169 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5170 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5171 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5172 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005173 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5174 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005175
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005176 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5177 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5178 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005179 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005180
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005181- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5182 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5183 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5184 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5185 floating arithmetic,
5186
5187 x = 9007199254740992.0
5188 print long(x)
5189
5190 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5191 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5192 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5193 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5194 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5195 functions are of good quality).
5196
5197 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5198 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5199 algorithms to break.
5200
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005201- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5202 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5203 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5204 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5205 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5206 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5207 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5208 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5209 order.
5210
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005211- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5212 operation along the most common code paths.
5213
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005214- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5215 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5216
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005217- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5218 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5219 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5220 {}.update(UserDict())
5221
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005222- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5223 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5224 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5225 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5226 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5227 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5228 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5229 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5230
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005231- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005232 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005233
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005234 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005235 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5236 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005237 join() method of strings
5238 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005239 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5240 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005241 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005242 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005243
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005244- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5245 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5246
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005247- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5248 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5249
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005250- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5251 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5252 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5253 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5254
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005255- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5256 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005257 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005258 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5259 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005260
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005261- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5262
5263
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005264Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005265-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005266
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005267- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005268 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005269 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5270 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5271
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005272- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5273 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5274
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005275- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5276 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5277 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5278 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5279
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005280- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5281 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5282 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5283
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005284- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5285
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005286- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5287
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005288- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5289 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5290 that are still imported into string.py).
5291
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005292- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5293
5294- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5295 Now it does.
5296
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005297- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5298
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005299- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5300 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5301 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5302 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5303 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005304 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5305 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005306
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005307- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5308 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5309 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5310 'help(object)'.
5311
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005312Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005313-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005314
5315- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005316 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005317 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5318 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5319
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005320- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005321 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5322 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005323
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005324C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005325-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005326
5327- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5328 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329
5330----
5331
5332**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**