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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000015- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
16 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
17
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000018- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000020
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000021- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 which was missing for no apparent reason.
24
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000025- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000026 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
27 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
28
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000029- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
30 types that support garbage collection.
31
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000032- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
33
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000034- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
35 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
36 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
37 Jython.
38
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000039- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
40
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
44Library
45-------
46
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000047- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
48 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
49 when dummy_threading is being used.
50
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000051- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
52 from a tarfile.
53
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000054- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000055 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000056
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000057- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
58 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
59 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
60 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
61
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000062- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
63 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
64
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000065- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
66 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
67 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
68 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
69 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
70 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
71 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
72 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
73 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
74 by some other method in progress).
75
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000076- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
77 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
78 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000079
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000080- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
81
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000082- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
83 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
84 AM Kuchling.
85
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000086- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
87 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
88 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
89
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000090- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
91 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
92 instead of unsigned.
93
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000094- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000095 no longer part of the public API.
96
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000097- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
98 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
99 string methods of the same name).
100
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000101- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
102 SF patch 982681.
103
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000104- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000105 SF patch 945642.
106
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000107- doctest unittest integration improvements:
108
109 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
110
111 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
112 DocTestSuites.
113
114- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
115 that provide thread-local data.
116
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000117- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
118 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
119
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000120- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
121
122- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
123 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
124 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
125
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000126
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000127Tools/Demos
128-----------
129
130Build
131-----
132
133C API
134-----
135
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000136- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
137 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
138
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000139Documentation
140-------------
141
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000142- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000143
144 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
145 assigning thier values
146
147 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
148
149 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
150
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000151- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000152
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000153New platforms
154-------------
155
156Tests
157-----
158
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000159- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000160 platforms that use the Makefile.
161
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000162- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
163 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
164 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
165
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000166Windows
167-------
168
169Mac
170---
171
172
173
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000174What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
175=================================
176
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000177*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000178
179Core and builtins
180-----------------
181
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000182- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
183 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
184 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
185 objects now (one object instead of three).
186
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000187- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
188 Windows DLLs.
189
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000190- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
191
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000192- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
193 a new .pyc magic.
194
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000195- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
196 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
197 be there.
198
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000199- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
200 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
201 the LC_NUMERIC category.
202
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000203- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
204 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
205 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
206
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000207- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
208
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000209- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
210 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
211 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000212
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000213- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
214 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
215
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000216- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
217
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000218- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000219 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000220
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000221- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
222
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000223- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
224
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000225- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
226 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
227
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000228- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
229 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
230 Fixes bug #858016 .
231
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000232- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
233 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
234 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
235
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000236- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
237 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
238 improves their performance (about 35%).
239
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000240- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
241 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
242 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
243
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000244- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
245 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
246 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
247 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
248
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000249- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
250 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
251 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
252 length is not known).
253
254- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
255 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000256 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
257 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000258 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
259
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000260- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
261 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
262
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000263- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
264 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
265 keyword arguments.
266
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000267- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
268 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
269 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
270
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000271- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
272 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
273 cases.
274
275- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
276 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
277 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
278 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
279 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
280 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
281 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
282 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
283 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
284 a release build.
285
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000286- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
287 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
288
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000289- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000290 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000291
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000292- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
293 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
294 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
295 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
296 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
297 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
298 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
299 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
300 destroyed.
301
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000302- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
303 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
304 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
305 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
306 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
307 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
308 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
309 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
310
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000311- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
312 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
313 character other than a space.
314
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000315- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
316 by the function object or by the method object, the function
317 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
318 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
319 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
320 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
321 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
322 attributes with the same name.
323
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000324- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
325 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
326 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
327 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
328 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
329 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
330 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
331 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
332 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
333 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
334 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
335 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
336 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
337 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000338
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000339- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
340 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
341 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
342 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
343 This has been repaired.
344
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000345- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
346
347- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
348
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000349- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
350 over a sequence.
351
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000352- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000353 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000354
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000355- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
356
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000357- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
358 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
359 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
360 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
361 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
362 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
363 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
364 records with equal keys is unchanged).
365
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000366- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
367 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
368 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
369
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000370- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
371 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
372 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
373 freelist.
374
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000375- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
376 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
377
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000378- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
379 number.
380
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000381- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
382 a TypeError exception.
383
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000384- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
385 820195.
386
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000387- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
388 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
389 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
390
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000391- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000392 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
393 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000394
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000395- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
396 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
397 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
398
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000399- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
400 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000401 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000402
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000403- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000404 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
405 the first call.
406
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000407
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000408Extension modules
409-----------------
410
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000411- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
412 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
413
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000414- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
415 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
416 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
417 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
418 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
419 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
420 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000421
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000422- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
423
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000424- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
425
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000426- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
427 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
428
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000429- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
430 fewer false positives.
431
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000432- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
433 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
434
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000435- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000436 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
437
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000438- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000439 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000440 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
441 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
442 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000443
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000444- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
445 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
446 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
447 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
448
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000449- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
450 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
451 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
452 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
453 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
454 #897625.
455
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000456- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
457 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
458
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000459- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
460 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
461 and pops on either side of the deque.
462
463- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
464 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
465
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000466- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
467 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
468 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
469 other functions that expect a function argument.
470
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000471- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
472
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000473- os.getsid was added.
474
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000475- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
476 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
477 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
478
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000479- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
480
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000481- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
482
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000483- readline.clear_history was added.
484
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000485- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
486
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000487- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
488
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000489- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
490
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000491- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
492
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000493- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
494
495- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
496
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000497- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
498
499- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
500
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000501- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
502 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
503 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
504
505- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
506 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
507 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
508 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
509 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
510 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
511 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
512
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000513- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
514 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
515 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
516 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000517
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000518- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000519 iterators from a single iterable.
520
521- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
522 of raising a TypeError exception.
523
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000524- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
525 as parameter.
526
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000527Library
528-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000529
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000530- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
531 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
532 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000533
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000534- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
535 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
536 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000537
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000538- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000539
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000540- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
541 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000542
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000543- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
544 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
545
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000546- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
547
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000548- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000549 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000550
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000551- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
552 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
553
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000554- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
555
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000556- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
557 on cygwin and mingw32.
558
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000559- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
560
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000561- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
562 module.
563
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000564- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
565 installation scheme for all platforms.
566
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000567- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000568 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000569
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000570- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
571 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
572 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
573
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000574- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
575 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
576 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
577
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000578- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
579
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000580- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
581
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000582- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
583 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
584
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000585- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
586 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
587 type pattern with the same value exists.
588
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000589- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
590 when run from the command prompt).
591
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000592- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
593 not taken into consideration when caching value.
594
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000595- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
596 default sort).
597
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000598- Added global runctx function to profile module
599
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000600- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
601
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000602- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
603
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000604- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
605
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000606- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000607 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
608 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
609 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
610 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
611 accordingly.
612
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000613- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
614 decoding standards.
615
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000616- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
617 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
618 called for all requests.
619
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000620- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
621 they are passed to the compiler.
622
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000623- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
624 indent, width and depth.
625
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000626- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
627 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
628
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000629- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
630 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
631
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000632- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
633
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000634- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
635
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000636- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
637
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000638- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
639 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
640
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000641- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000642 for better performance.
643
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000644- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000645
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000646- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
647 a string).
648
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000649- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
650
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000651- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
652
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000653- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
654
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000655- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
656
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000657- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
658 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
659 list of fieldnames.
660
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000661- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
662 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
663
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000664- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
665
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000666- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
667 empty lists.
668
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000669- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
670 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
671 and shelves.
672
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000673- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
674 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
675
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000676- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000677 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
678 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000679
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000680- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
681 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000682 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000683
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000684- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000685 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
686 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
687
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000688- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
689 and removed in Py2.4.
690
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000691- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
692
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000693- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
694
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000695Tools/Demos
696-----------
697
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000698- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
699 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
700
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000701- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
702
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000703- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
704 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
705 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
706 destination in situations where both files are given.
707
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000708- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
709 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
710 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
711 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
712
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000713- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
714
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000715- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
716 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
717 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
718 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
719 now.
720
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000721- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
722 in effect
723
724- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
725 C-c C-h
726
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000727- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
728 -d option was given.
729
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000730Build
731-----
732
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000733- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
734 build under OS X.
735
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000736- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
737 --enable-profiling.
738
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000739- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
740 is configured --with-tsc.
741
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000742- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
743 on AMD64.
744
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000745- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
746 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
747
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000748- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
749 removed.
750
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000751- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
752 supported (see PEP 11).
753
754- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
755
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000756- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
757
758- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
759 (see PEP 11).
760
761- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
762 sizeof(char) must be 1.
763
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000764C API
765-----
766
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000767- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
768 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
769 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
770
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000771- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
772 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
773 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
774 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
775
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000776- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
777 generator objects.
778
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000779- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
780 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000781 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
782 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000783
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000784- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
785 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
786
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000787- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
788 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
789 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
790 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
791 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
792
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000793- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
794 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
795 about 10% faster.
796
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000797- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
798 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
799
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000800- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
801 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
802 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
803 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
804
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000805Windows
806-------
807
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000808- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
809 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
810 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
811 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
812
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000813- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
814 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
815 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
816
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000817
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000818What's New in Python 2.3 final?
819===============================
820
821*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
822
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000823IDLE
824----
825
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000826- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
827 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
828 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
829 context-menu actions.
830
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000831- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
832 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
833 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
834 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
835 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
836 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
837 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
838 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
839 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
840
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000841
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000842What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
843=============================================
844
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000845*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000846
847Core and builtins
848-----------------
849
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000850- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000851 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000852 comment at the end are still unsupported.
853
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000854Extension modules
855-----------------
856
857- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
858 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
859 than once. This has been fixed.
860
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000861- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
862 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
863 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
864 call.
865
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000866- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
867
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000868Library
869-------
870
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000871- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
872 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
873
874- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
875 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
876 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
877 restored.
878
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000879IDLE
880----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000881
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000882- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000883
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000884Build
885-----
886
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000887- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
888 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
889
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000890C API
891-----
892
893Windows
894-------
895
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000896- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
897 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
898
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000899- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
900
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000901Mac
902---
903
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000904- Various fixes to pimp.
905
906- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
907
908- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
909 more problems than it solves.
910
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000911
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000912What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
913=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000914
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000915*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
916
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000917Core and builtins
918-----------------
919
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000920- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
921 by sys.setcheckinterval().
922
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000923- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
924 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000925 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000926
927- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
928 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
929 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000930 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000931
932- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
933 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000934
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000935- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
936 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
937 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
938
939- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000940 770247.
941
942- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000943
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000944Extension modules
945-----------------
946
947- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
948 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
949
950- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
951
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000952- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
953
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000954- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
955 contained within the _strptime module.
956
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000957- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
958 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
959
960- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000961 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
962
963- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
964 the find_class attribute, if present.
965
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000966- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000967
968 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
969 (SF bug 763298).
970
971 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000972 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
973 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
974 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000975
976 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
977
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000978Library
979-------
980
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000981- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
982
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000983- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
984 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
985 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
986 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
987 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
988 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
989 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
990 or Tester().
991
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000992- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
993 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
994 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
995 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
996 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
997 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
998 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
999 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1000 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001001
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001002 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001003
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001004- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1005 weren't before was an oversight.
1006
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001007- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1008 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1009
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001010- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1011 when there are no lines.
1012
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001013- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1014 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1015
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001016- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1017 to child processes.
1018
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001019- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1020
1021- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1022
1023- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1024 xmlrpclib.
1025
1026- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1027 responses.
1028
1029- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1030 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1031
1032- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1033 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1034 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1035
1036- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1037 used as patterns.
1038
1039- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1040 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1041 than Tk 8.3.
1042
1043- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1044
1045- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001046
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001047Tools/Demos
1048-----------
1049
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001050- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1051
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001052- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1053
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001054- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001055
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001056Build
1057-----
1058
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001059- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1060
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001061- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1062
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001063- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1064 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001065
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001066- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1067 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1068 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001069
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001070C API
1071-----
1072
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001073- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1074 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1075
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001076Windows
1077-------
1078
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001079- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1080 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1081 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1082 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1083 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1084 Python exception ::
1085
1086 thread.error: can't start new thread
1087
1088 is raised now.
1089
1090- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1091 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1092 instead of from DLL teardown.
1093
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001094Mac
1095---
1096
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001097- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001098 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001099 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1100 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1101 the executable in the bundle.
1102
1103- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001104
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001105- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1106
1107- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1108 on Panther.
1109
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001110What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1111================================
1112
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001113*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001114
1115Core and builtins
1116-----------------
1117
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001118- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1119 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1120 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1121 with the -i option.
1122
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001123- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1124 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1125
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001126- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1127 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1128
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001129- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1130 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1131 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1132 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1133 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1134 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1135 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1136 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1137 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1138 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1139 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1140 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1141 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001142
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001143- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1144 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1145 embedded in a lambda expression.
1146
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001147- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1148 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1149 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1150 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1151 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1152
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001153- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1154 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1155 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1156
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001157- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1158 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1159
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001160- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1161 It's writable again.
1162
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001163- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1164 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1165 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001166 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001167
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001168- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1169 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1170 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1171
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001172Extension modules
1173-----------------
1174
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001175- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1176 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1177
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001178- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1179 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1180 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1181 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1182
1183- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1184 collection.
1185
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001186- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1187 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1188 unique within a single program run.
1189
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001190- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1191 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1192
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001193- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1194 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1195
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001196- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1197 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001198
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001199- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1200
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001201- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1202 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1203
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001204- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1205 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1206 for many BSD-derived systems.
1207
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001208
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001209Library
1210-------
1211
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001212- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1213 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1214 primary ones:
1215
1216 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1217 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1218 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1219
1220 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1221 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1222 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1223 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1224 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1225 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1226
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001227- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1228 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1229 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1230 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1231 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1232 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1233 argument.
1234
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001235- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1236 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1237 in the archive.
1238
1239- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1240 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1241
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001242- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1243 569574).
1244
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001245- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1246 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1247 no more.
1248
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001249- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1250 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1251 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1252 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1253 code coverage.
1254
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001255- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1256 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1257 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001258 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1259 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001260
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001261- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1262 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1263 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001264 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001265
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001266- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1267
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001268- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1269 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1270 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1271 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1272
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001273- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1274 handling.
1275
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001276- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1277 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1278
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001279- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1280 in socket.py.
1281
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001282- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1283
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001284- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1285 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1286 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1287 opener with proxy support.
1288
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001289- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1290
1291- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1292
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001293Tools/Demos
1294-----------
1295
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001296- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1297
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001298- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1299
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001300- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1301 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001302
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001303- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1304 files.
1305
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001306Build
1307-----
1308
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001309- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001310 different root directory.
1311
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001312C API
1313-----
1314
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001315- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1316 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1317 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1318 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1319 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1320 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1321 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1322 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1323 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1324 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1325
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001326- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1327 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1328 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1329 from Python.
1330
1331
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001332New platforms
1333-------------
1334
1335None this time.
1336
1337Tests
1338-----
1339
1340- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1341 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1342
1343Windows
1344-------
1345
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001346- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1347
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001348- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1349 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1350 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1351 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1352 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1353 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1354 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1355 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1356 that's what it's for.
1357
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001358Mac
1359---
1360
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001361- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1362 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1363 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1364 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001365- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1366 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1367- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001368
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001369SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1370------------------------------------
1371
1372430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1373598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1374622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1375661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1376683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1377697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1378713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1379724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1380727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1381729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1382730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1383731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1384732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1385733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1386735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1387740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1388744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1389745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1390747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1391749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1392751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1393753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1394755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1395757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1396760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1397
1398
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001399What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1400================================
1401
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001402*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001403
1404Core and builtins
1405-----------------
1406
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001407- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1408 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1409
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001410- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1411 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1412 and cannot be strings).
1413
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001414- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1415 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1416 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1417 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1418
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001419- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1420 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1421 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1422 Python itself.
1423
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001424- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1425 the referenced object, if it has one.
1426
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001427- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1428 the thread started at
1429 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1430
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001431- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1432 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1433 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1434 placed on a list index.
1435
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001436- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1437 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1438 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1439 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1440
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001441- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1442 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1443 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1444 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1445 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1446 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1447 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1448
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001449- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1450 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1451 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1452 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1453 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1454
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001455- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1456 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001457
1458- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1459 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1460 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1461 #693195.)
1462
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001463- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1464 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001465
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001466- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001467 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001468 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1469 interpreter executions, would fail.
1470
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001471- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001472 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001473 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001474
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001475Extension modules
1476-----------------
1477
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001478- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1479 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1480 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1481 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1482
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001483- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1484 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1485
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001486- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1487 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1488 and Greg Chapman.)
1489
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001490- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1491 recursively.
1492
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001493- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001494 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1495 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1496 leaks.
1497
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001498- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1499
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001500- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1501 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1502 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1503 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1504 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1505 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1506 #705836.
1507
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001508- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001509 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1510
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001511- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1512 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1513 See SF bug #692416.
1514
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001515- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1516 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1517
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001518- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1519 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1520 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001521
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001522- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001523 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1524 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1525
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001526- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1527 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1528 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1529 timeouts to work properly.
1530
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001531Library
1532-------
1533
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001534- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1535 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1536 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1537 future release.
1538
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001539- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1540 for querying platform dependent features.
1541
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001542- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001543
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001544- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1545 pickle protocol versions.
1546
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001547- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1548 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1549 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1550
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001551- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1552
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001553- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1554 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1555 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1556 modules.
1557
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001558- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1559 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1560 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1561
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001562- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1563 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1564
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001565- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1566 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1567 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1568
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001569- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001570 MS Office extensions.
1571
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001572- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1573 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1574
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001575- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1576 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1577
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001578- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1579 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1580 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1581 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1582 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1583 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1584
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001585- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1586 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1587 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001588
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001589- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1590 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1591 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1592
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001593- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1594
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001595- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1596 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1597 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1598
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001599Tools/Demos
1600-----------
1601
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001602- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1603 See the module docstring for details.
1604
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001605Build
1606-----
1607
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001608- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1609 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001610
1611C API
1612-----
1613
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001614- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1615
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001616- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1617 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1618 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1619
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001620- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1621 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001622
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001623 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1624 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1625 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001626
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001627- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001628 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1629
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001630- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1631 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1632 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001633
1634New platforms
1635-------------
1636
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001637None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001638
1639Tests
1640-----
1641
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001642- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1643 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001644
1645Windows
1646-------
1647
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001648- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1649 function.
1650
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001651- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1652 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001653
1654Mac
1655---
1656
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001657- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1658 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001659
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001660- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1661 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001662
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001663- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1664 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1665 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001666
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001667- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001668 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1669 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001670
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001671- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1672 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001673
1674
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001675What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1676=================================
1677
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001678*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001679
1680Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001681-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001682
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001683- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1684 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1685 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1686
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001687- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1688 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1689 (SF patch #664376.)
1690
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001691- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1692 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1693 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1694 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1695 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1696 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001697 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001698
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001699- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1700 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1701 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1702 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001703 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001704
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001705- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1706 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1707 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1708 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1709 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1710 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1711 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1712 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1713 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1714 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1715 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1716
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001717- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1718 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1719 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1720 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1721 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1722 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1723
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001724- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1725 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1726
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001727- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1728 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1729 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1730 case.)
1731
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001732- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1733 passed as unicode strings.
1734
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001735- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1736 See SF bug #683467.
1737
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001738- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1739 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1740
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001741- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1742
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001743- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1744
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001745- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1746 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1747 arguments.
1748
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001749- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1750 See SF bug #667147.
1751
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001752- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001753 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001754 See SF bug #676155.
1755
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001756- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001757 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001758 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1759 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1760 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1761 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1762 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1763 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001764
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001765Extension modules
1766-----------------
1767
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001768- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1769 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1770 tp_as_number pointer.
1771
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001772- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1773 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1774 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1775 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1776 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1777
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001778- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1779
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001780- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1781
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001782- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001783 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001784 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1785 patch #678531.)
1786
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001787- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1788 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1789
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001790- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1791 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1792
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001793- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1794
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001795- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1796 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1797 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1798
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001799- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1800
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001801- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1802 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1803
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001804- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001805
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001806- datetime changes:
1807
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001808 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1809
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001810 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1811 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1812 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1813 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1814 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1815 now.
1816
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001817 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001818 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1819 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001820
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001821 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001822 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001823 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1824 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1825 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1826 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001827
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001828 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1829 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1830 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001831 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1832
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001833 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1834 by a later example coded by Guido.
1835
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001836 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001837 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1838 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1839 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001840 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1841 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1842
1843 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1844 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1845 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1846 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1847 tzinfo subclass instance.
1848
1849 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1850 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1851 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1852 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1853 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1854 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1855 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1856 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001857
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001858 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1859 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1860 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1861 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1862 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001863 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1864
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001865 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001866
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001867 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1868 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1869 as a naive datetime object.
1870
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001871 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1872 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1873 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1874
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001875 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1876 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1877 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1878 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1879 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1880 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1881 comparison.
1882
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001883 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1884 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1885 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1886 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001887 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001888
1889 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001890
1891 and ::
1892
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001893 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1894
1895 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1896 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1897 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1898 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1899
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001900 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1901 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1902 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1903 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1904 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1905
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001906 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1907 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001908 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1909 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001910
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001911Library
1912-------
1913
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001914- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1915 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1916
1917- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1918 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1919 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1920 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1921 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1922 See PEP 307 for details.
1923
1924- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1925 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1926
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001927- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1928 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001929 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001930 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1931 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001932 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001933
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001934- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1935 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1936
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001937- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1938 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1939 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1940
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001941- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1942
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001943- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1944 exception.
1945
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001946- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1947 class.
1948
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001949- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1950 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1951 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1952
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001953- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1954 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1955
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001956- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001957 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1958 See SF bug #659228.
1959
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001960- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1961 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1962 See SF patch #651082.
1963
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001964- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001965
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001966- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1967 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1968
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001969- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001970 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001971
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001972- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1973 DOS paths from other platforms.
1974
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001975Tools/Demos
1976-----------
1977
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001978- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1979 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1980 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1981 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1982 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1983 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1984 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1985 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1986 example:
1987
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001988 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1989 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001990
1991 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1992
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001993
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001994Build
1995-----
1996
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001997- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1998 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1999 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002000 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2001
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002002 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2003
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002004- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2005 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2006 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2007 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2008 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2009 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2010 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2011 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2012 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2013
2014- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2015 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2016 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2017 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2018
2019- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2020 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2021
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002022C API
2023-----
2024
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002025- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2026 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002027
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002028- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2029 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2030 tp_as_number pointer.
2031
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002032- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2033 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2034 (SF #681367)
2035
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002036- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2037 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2038 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2039 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002040
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002041Tests
2042-----
2043
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002044- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002045 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2046 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2047 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2048 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2049 pydoc.)
2050
2051- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2052
2053- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002054
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002055Windows
2056-------
2057
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002058- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2059 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2060 time).
2061
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002062- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2063 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2064
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002065- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2066 release without strong cryptography.
2067
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002068- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002069 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002070
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002071- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2072 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2073
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002074Mac
2075---
2076
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002077- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2078 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002079
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002080- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2081 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2082 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002083
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002084- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2085 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002086
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002087- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2088 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2089 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2090 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002091
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002092- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002093 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2094 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2095 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002096
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002097
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002098What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002099=================================
2100
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002101*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002102
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002103Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002104--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002105
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002106- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2107
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002108- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2109 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002110 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002111 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002112 a different meaning than before.
2113
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002114- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002115 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002116 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002117
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002118- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002119 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002120 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002121
2122- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2123 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2124 and deallocation.
2125
2126- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2127 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2128
2129- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2130 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2131 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2132 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2133 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2134
2135- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2136 now detected by the garbage collector.
2137
2138- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2139 [SF bug 519621]
2140
2141- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2142 identifier.
2143
2144- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2145 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2146 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2147 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2148 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2149 [SF bug 563060]
2150
2151- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2152 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2153 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2154 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2155 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2156
2157- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2158 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2159 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2160
2161- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2162
2163- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2164 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2165 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2166 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2167 state of the slots would be lost.)
2168
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002169Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002170-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002171
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002172- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002173 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2174 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2175 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2176 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002177 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2178 Jython 2.1.
2179
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002180- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002181 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002182 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2183 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2184 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2185 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2186 these, see PEP 302.
2187
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002188- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2189 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2190 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2191
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002192- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2193 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2194 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2195
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002196- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2197 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2198 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2199
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002200- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2201 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2202 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2203 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2204 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2205 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2206 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2207 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2208 releases or implementations.
2209
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002210- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002211 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2212 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002213
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002214- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2215 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2216
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002217- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2218 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2219 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2220
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002221- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2222 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2223
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002224- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2225 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002226 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2227 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002228
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002229- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2230 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2231 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2232 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2233 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2234
2235 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2236 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2237 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2238 pattern.
2239
2240 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2241 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2242 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2243 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2244
2245 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2246 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2247 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2248 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2249 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2250 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2251
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002252- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2253 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2254 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2255 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2256 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2257 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2258 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2259 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002260
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002261- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2262 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2263 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2264 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2265 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002266 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2267 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2268 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2269 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2270 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2271 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2272 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002273
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002274- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2275 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2276
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002277- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2278 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2279 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2280 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2281 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2282 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2283 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2284 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2285 to Zack Weinberg!
2286
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002287- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2288 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2289 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2290 type. This has been fixed now.
2291
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002292- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2293 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2294 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2295
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002296- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2297 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2298 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2299 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2300 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2301 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2302 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2303 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002304 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002305
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002306- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2307 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2308 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002309
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002310- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2311 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2312 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2313 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2314 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2315 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2316 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2317 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002318 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002319 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2320 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2321
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002322- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2323 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2324 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2325 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2326 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2327 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2328 this.)
2329
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002330- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2331 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002332 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002333 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002334 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2335 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002336 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2337 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002338
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002339- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2340 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2341 currently running.
2342
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002343- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2344 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2345 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2346 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2347
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002348- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2349 as directory names.
2350
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002351- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2352 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2353
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002354- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2355 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2356
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002357- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002358 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2359 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002360
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002361- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2362 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2363 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2364 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2365 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2366
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002367- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2368 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2369 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2370 removed.
2371
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002372- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2373 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2374 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2375
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002376- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2377 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2378 to __debug__.
2379
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002380- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2381 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2382 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2383
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002384- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2385 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2386 deprecated now.
2387
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002388- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2389 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2390 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002391
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002392- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2393 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2394 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2395 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2396 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002397
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002398- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2399 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2400
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002401- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2402 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2403 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002404 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002405 is backward compatible.
2406
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002407- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2408 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2409 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2410 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2411 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2412
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002413- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2414 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2415 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2416 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2417 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2418 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002419
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002420- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2421 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2422
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002423- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2424 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2425
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002426- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2427 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2428 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2429 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2430 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2431
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002432- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2433 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2434 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2435
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002436- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002437 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2438
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002439- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2440 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2441 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002442
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002443- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2444 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2445
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002446- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2447 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2448 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2449
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002450- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2451
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002452Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002453-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002454
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002455- Added three operators to the operator module:
2456 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2457 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2458 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2459
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002460- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2461
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002462- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2463 archives.
2464
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002465- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2466 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2467 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2468
2469 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2470
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002471- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2472 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2473 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002474 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002475
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002476- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2477 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2478 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2479 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002480 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2481 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2482 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2483 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002484
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002485- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2486 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002487
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002488- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2489
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002490- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2491 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2492
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002493- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2494 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2495 supported.
2496
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002497- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2498
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002499- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2500 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002501
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002502- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2503 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2504
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002505- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2506
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002507- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2508 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2509
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002510- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2511 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2512 functions but callable type objects.
2513
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002514- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002515 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002516 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002517
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002518- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2519 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002520
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002521- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2522 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002523
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002524- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2525 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2526 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2527 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2528
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002529- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2530 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002531
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002532- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2533 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2534 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2535 and __imul__.
2536
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002537- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002538 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2539 is called.
2540
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002541- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2542 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2543 interpreter was compiled.
2544
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002545- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2546 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2547 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002548 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002549 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2550 1, not 2.
2551
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002552- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2553 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2554 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2555 limit.
2556
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002557- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2558 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2559 bug #623464.
2560
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002561- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2562 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2563 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2564 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002566Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002567-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002568
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002569- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2570
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002571- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2572 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2573 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2574 with Python 2.3a2.
2575
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002576- os.path exposes getctime.
2577
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002578- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002579 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002580 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002581 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002582 unit tests of floating point results.
2583
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002584- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2585 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2586 has been increased.
2587
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002588- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2589 executed.
2590
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002591- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2592 postinstallation script.
2593
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002594- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2595 test the current module.
2596
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002597- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002598 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2599 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2600 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2601 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2602
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002603- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002604 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002605 Ward's Optik package.
2606
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002607- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2608 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2609 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2610 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2611
2612- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2613 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002614 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002615
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002616- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2617 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2618 shelf are binary pickles.
2619
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002620- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2621 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2622
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002623- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2624 modules are iterators now.
2625
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002626- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2627 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2628 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2629 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2630 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2631 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002632
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002633- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2634 with their entity value.
2635
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002636- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2637
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002638- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2639 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002640
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002641- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2642 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002643 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002644
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002645- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2646 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2647 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2648 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2649 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2650 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2651 main():
2652
2653 import locale
2654 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2655
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002656- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2657 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2658
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002659- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2660 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2661 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2662 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2663 to the new standard.
2664
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002665- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2666 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2667 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2668 an extension to the database.
2669
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002670- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2671 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2672 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2673 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002674 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002675
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002676- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002677 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002678
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002679- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2680 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2681 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2682 bounded integers.
2683
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002684- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2685 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2686 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2687 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2688 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2689 in existence.
2690
2691 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2692 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2693 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2694 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2695 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2696 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2697
2698 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2699 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2700 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2701 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2702
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002703- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2704 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2705 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2706
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002707- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2708
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002709- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2710 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2711 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2712 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2713
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002714- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2715 argument.
2716
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002717- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2718 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2719 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2720 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2721 [SF patch 560794].
2722
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002723- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2724 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2725 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002726 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2727 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2728 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002729
2730- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2731 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002732
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002733- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2734 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2735 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2736 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002737
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002738- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2739 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2740 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2741 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2742 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2743
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002744- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002745
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002746- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2747
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002748- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2749 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2750 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2751 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2752 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2753 identical to None.
2754
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002755- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2756 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2757 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2758 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2759 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2760 results now.
2761
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002762- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2763 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2764
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002765- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2766 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2767 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2768 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2769 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2770 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2771 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2772 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2773
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002774- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2775
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002776- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2777 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2778
2779- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2780 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2781 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2782 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2783 and other systems.
2784
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002785- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2786 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2787 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2788 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 +00002789 work well with these.
2790
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002791- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2792
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002793- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002794 connections.
2795
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002796- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2797 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2798 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2799
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002800- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2801 sets
2802
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002803- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2804 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2805 name.
2806
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002807- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2808 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2809 passed in.
2810
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002811- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002812 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002813 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2814 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002815
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002816- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2817
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002818- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2819
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002820- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2821 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2822 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2823
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002824- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2825 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2826 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2827 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002828 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002829
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002830- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002831 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002832 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002833
2834- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2835 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2836 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2837
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002838- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002839 the value of its expression argument.
2840
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002841- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2842 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2843 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2844
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002845- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2846 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2847 skipstone browser was included.
2848
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002849- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2850 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2851
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002852Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002853-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002854
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002855- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2856 names in addition to accepting file names.
2857
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002858- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2859 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2860 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2861 still used and useful.)
2862
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002863- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2864 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2865 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2866 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002867
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002868- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2869 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2870 the generated binary.
2871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002872Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002874
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002875- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2876
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002877- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2878 except in the hands of experts.
2879
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002880- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002881 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2882 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2883 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002884
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002885- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2886 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2887 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2888 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2889 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2890 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2891 builds.
2892
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002893- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2894 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2895 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2896 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2897 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2898 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2899 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2900 new type.
2901
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002902- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002903
2904 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2905 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2906 positive infinities.
2907
2908 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2909 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2910 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2911 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2912 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2913 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2914 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2915
2916 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2917
2918 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2919
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002920- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2921 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2922 size of the executable.
2923
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002924- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2925 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2926 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2927 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002928
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002929- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2930
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002931- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2932 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2933 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002934
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002935- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2936 well as Unix.
2937
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002938- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2939 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2940 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2941 modules in the README file for details.
2942
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002943C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002944-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002945
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002946- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2947 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002948 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002949 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002950 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002951
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002952- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2953 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2954 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2955 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2956 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2957 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002958 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002959 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2960 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2961 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2962 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2963 aligned.)
2964
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002965- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2966 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2967 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2968
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002969- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2970 level.
2971
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002972- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2973 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2974 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2975 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2976 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2977
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002978- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2979 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2980 code.
2981
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002982- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2983 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2984 adjusting for negative indices.
2985
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002986- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2987 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2988 object.
2989
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002990- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2991 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2992 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2993
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002994- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2995 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002996
2997- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2998
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002999- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3000 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3001 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3002 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3003
3004- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3005
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003006- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003007
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003008- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003009 without going through the buffer API.
3010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003012
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003013- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3014 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3015 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3016 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3017
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003018- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3019 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3020
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003021- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003022 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3023
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003024New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003026
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003027- OpenVMS is now supported.
3028
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003029- AtheOS is now supported.
3030
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003031- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3032
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003033- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3034
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003035Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-----
3037
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003038- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3039 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3040 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003041
3042Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003043-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003044
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003045- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3046 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3047 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3048 bugs.
3049 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003050 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003051 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3052 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003053 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003054
3055- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003056 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003057
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003058- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3059 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3060
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003061- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3062 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003063 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003064 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3065
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003066- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3067 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3068 use files" uninstall option).
3069
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003070- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3071
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003072- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3073 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3074
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003075- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3076 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3077 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3078
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003079- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3080 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3081 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3082 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3083 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003084 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3085 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3086 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003087
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003088- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003089 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003090 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3091 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3092 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3093 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3094 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3095 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3096 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3097 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3098 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3099 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3100 work around.
3101
3102- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3103 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3104 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3105 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3106 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3107 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3108 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3109 specified with O_CREAT too).
3110
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003111Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112----
3113
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003114- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003115
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003116- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3117 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3118 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3119
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003120- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3121 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3122 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3123
3124- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3125 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3126 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3127 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3128 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3129 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3130 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3131 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003132
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003133- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3134 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3135 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003136
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003137- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3138 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3139 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3140 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3141 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003142
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003143- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3144 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3145 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003146
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003147- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3148 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003150- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3151 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3152 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3153 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3154 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003155
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003156- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3157 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3158 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3159
3160- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3161 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3162 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003163
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003164- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3165 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3166 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3167 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003168 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003169
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003170- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3171 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003172
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003173- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3174 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003175
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003176- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003177 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003178 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3179 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003180
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003181
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003182What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003183===============================
3184
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3186
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003187Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003189
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003190- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3191 with a custom metaclass.
3192
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003193Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003195
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003196- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3197 are proxies.
3198
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003199Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003201
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003202- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3203 very short strings.
3204
3205- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3206 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3207 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3208 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3209 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3210
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003211Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003213
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003214- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3215 close or delete time).
3216
3217- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3218 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3219
3220- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3221
3222- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003223 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003224
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003225Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003227
3228Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003229-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003230
3231C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003232-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003233
3234New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003236
3237Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003239
3240Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003242
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003243- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3244
3245- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3246 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3247
3248- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3249 deleted at process exit time.
3250
3251- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3252 in backslash.
3253
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003254Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003256
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003257- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3258 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3259 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3260
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003261
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003262What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003263===========================
3264
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003265*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3266
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003267Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003269
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003270- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3271 been extensively updated. See
3272
3273 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3274
3275 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3276
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003277- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3278 deleted!
3279
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003280- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3281 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3282 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3283 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3284 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3285
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003286- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3287
3288 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3289 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3290
3291 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3292 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3293 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3294 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3295 supported anyway.
3296
3297 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3298 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3299
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003300- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3301 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3302 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3303 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3304 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003305
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003306- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3307 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3308 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3309
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003310Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003312
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003313- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3314 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3315 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3316 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3317 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3318 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003319 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3320 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3321 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3322 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003323
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003324- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3325 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3326 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3327
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003328Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003330
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003331- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3332
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003333Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003335
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003336- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3337 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3338 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3339 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3340 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3341 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3342
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003343- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3344
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003345- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3346
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003347- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3348
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003349- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3350 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3351 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3352
3353- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3354
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003355Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003356-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003357
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003358- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3359 off a search on Google.
3360
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003361Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003363
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003364- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3365 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3366 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3367 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3368 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3369 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3370 other platforms should do likewise.
3371
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003372- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3373 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3374 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3375
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003376C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003377-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003378
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003379- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3380 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3381 producing key-value pairs.
3382
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003383- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003384 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003385 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3386 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3387 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3388 previously went unchallenged.
3389
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003390New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003391-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003392
3393Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003395
3396Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003398
3399Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003400----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003401
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003402- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3403 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003404
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003405- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3406 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3407 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3408 home.
3409
3410
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003411What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003412===========================
3413
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3415
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003416Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003418
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003419- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3420 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003421
3422 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003423 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003424
3425 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3426 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003427 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003428 This needs to be documented.
3429
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003430- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3431 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3432
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003433- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3434 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3435 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3436
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003437- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3438 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3439
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003440- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3441 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3442 class forbids it).
3443
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003444- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3445 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3446 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3447
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003448- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3449
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003450Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003452
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003453- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3454 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003455 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003456
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003457- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3458 (like 1 + '').
3459
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003460Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003462
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003463- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3464 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3465 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3466 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003467 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003468 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3469
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003470- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3471 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3472 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3473 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3474
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003475- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3476 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003477 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3478 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3479 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003480
3481- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3482 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003483
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003484- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3485 bytes on its input.
3486
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003487Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003489
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003490- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003491 convenience function.
3492
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003493- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3494 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3495 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003496 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3497 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3498 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3499 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3500 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3501 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003502
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003503- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3504 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3505 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3506 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3507
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003508- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3509 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3510 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3511
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003512- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3513 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3514 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3515 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3516
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003517- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3518 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003520 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3521 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3522 new -l and -e options.
3523
3524- statcache is now deprecated.
3525
3526- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3527 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003529 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3530 time properly taken into account.
3531
3532- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3533 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3534 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3535 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3536
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003537Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003538-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003539
3540Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003542
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003543- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3544 is built with libdb3 if available.
3545
3546- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3547
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003548C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003550
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003551- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3552 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3553 PySequence_Size().
3554
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003555- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3556
3557- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3558 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3559 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3560
3561- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3562 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3563
3564- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3565 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3566
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003567New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003569
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003570- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3571 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3572
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003573- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3574 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3575
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003576- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3577
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003578Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003580
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003581- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3582 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3583
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003584Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003586
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003587Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003589
3590- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3591 removed completely in the next release.
3592
3593- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3594 OSX.
3595
3596- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3597 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3598
3599- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3600
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003601
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003602What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003603===========================
3604
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3606
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003607Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003609
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003610- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003611 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003612 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003613 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3614 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003615 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3616 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003617 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3618 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003619
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003620- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3621 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3622
3623- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3624 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3625
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003626Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003628
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003629- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3630 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3631 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3632 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3633 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3634 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3635 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3636 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3637
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003638- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3639 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3640 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3641 example).
3642
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003643- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003644 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003645 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003646 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003647
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003648- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3649 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3650 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003651 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003652
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003653- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3654 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3655 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3656 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3657 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3658 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3659
3660 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3661
3662 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3663
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003664Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003666
3667- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3668
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003669- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3670
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003671- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3672 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003673
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003674- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3675 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3676 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3677 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3678 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3679 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003680 attributes.
3681
3682- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3683 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3684 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003685
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003686- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3687 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3688 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003689
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003690- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3691 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3692 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003693 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3694 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3695
3696- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3697 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003698
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003699Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003701
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003702- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3703 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3704
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003705- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3706 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3707 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3708 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3709
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003710- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3711 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3712 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3713 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3714
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003715 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3716 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3717 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3718 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3719 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3720 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3721 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3722 without losing information).
3723
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003724- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003725 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3726 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3727 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3728 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3729 module).
3730
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003731 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003732 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3733 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3734 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3735 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003736
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003737- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003738 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3739 encoding.
3740
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003741- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3742 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3743
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003745 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3746
3747- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3748 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3749 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3750 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3751
3752- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3753
3754- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3755 ON, and OFF.
3756
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003757- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3758 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3759
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003760Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003762
3763- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3764 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3765 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003766
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003767- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3768 been added: -X and -E.
3769
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003770Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003772
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003773- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3774 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3775
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003776C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003778
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003779- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3780 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3781 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3782 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3783 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3784
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003785- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3786 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3787 as long) arguments.
3788
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003789- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3790 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3791 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3792 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3793 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3794 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3795
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003796- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3797 input.
3798
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003799New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003801
3802Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003803-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003804
3805Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003807
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003808- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3809 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3810 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3811
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003812- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3813 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3814 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003815 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003816
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3818 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3819 import signal
3820 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003821
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003822 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003823 while 1:
3824 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003825 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003826 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3827 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3828 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3829 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003830
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003831
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003832What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3833===========================
3834
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3836
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003837Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003839
3840- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3841 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3842 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3843
3844- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3845 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3846 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3847 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3848 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3849 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3850 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003851
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003852- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003853 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003854 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3855 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3856 associate a docstring with a property.
3857
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003858- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3859 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3860 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3861 other built-in object types.
3862
3863- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3864 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3865 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3866 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3867 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3868
3869- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3870 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3871
3872- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3873 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003874 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003875 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3876 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3877 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3878 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3879 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3880
3881- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3882 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3883 class.
3884
3885- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3886 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3887 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3888 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3889
3890- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3891 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3892 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3893 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3894
3895- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3896 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3897
3898- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3899 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3900 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3901 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3902 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003903 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003904 with the same value as s.
3905
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003906- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3907
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003908Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003910
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003911- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3912
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003913- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3914 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3915 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3916 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3917 objects.
3918
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003919- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3920 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003921 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3922 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3923
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003924- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3925 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3926 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3927
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003928Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003930
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003931- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3932 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3933 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3934 by the instances.
3935
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003936- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3937 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3938 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3939
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003940- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3941 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3942 before the entire comparison is complete.
3943
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003944- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3945 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3946 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3947
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003948- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3949 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3950 getwriter().
3951
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003952- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3953 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3954
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003955- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003956 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3957 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3958
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003959- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3960 iterable object.
3961
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003962- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3963 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003964
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003965- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3966 authentication.
3967
3968- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3969 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003970
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003971- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003972 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3973 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3974 a sample driver.)
3975
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003976Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003978
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003979- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3980 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3981 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3982 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3983 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3984 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3985 kernel has large file support.
3986
3987- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3988 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3989 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3990 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3991 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3992
3993- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3994 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3995 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3996
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003997C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003999
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004000- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4001 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4002
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004003New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004005
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004006- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4007 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4008
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004009Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004010-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004011
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004012- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4013 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4014 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4015 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4016 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4017
4018- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4019 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4020 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4021 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4022
4023- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4024 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4025
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004026Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004028
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004029- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004030 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4031 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004032
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004033
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004034What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4035===========================
4036
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4038
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004039Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004040----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004041
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004042- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4043 big to represent as a C double.
4044
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004045- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4046 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4047 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4048 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4049 restriction).
4050
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004051- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4052 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4053 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4054 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4055 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4056
4057 >>> dir([])
4058 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4059 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4060 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4061 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4062 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4063 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4064 'reverse', 'sort']
4065
4066 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4067
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004068- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004069 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4070 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4071 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4072 OverflowError exception.
4073
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004074- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004075 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004076 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4077 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4078 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4079 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4080 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004081 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4083 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4084
4085 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4086 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4087 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4088 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004089
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004090- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004091 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4092 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4093 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4094 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4095 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4096 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4097 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4098 once it is created.
4099
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004100- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4101 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4102 (key, value) pairs.
4103
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004104- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004105 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4106 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4107
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004108- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4109 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4110 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4111 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4112 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004113
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004114- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004115 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4116 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4117
4118 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4119
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004120- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004121 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4122
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004123Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004125
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004126- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004127 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4128 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004129
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004130- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4131 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4132 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4133 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4134 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4135 in this area anymore).
4136
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004137- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4138 threading.Timer.
4139
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004140- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4141 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4142
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004143- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004144 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4145
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004146- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004147 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4148 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4149 converted to Python longs.
4150
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004151- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004152 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4153
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004154- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4155 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4156 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4157
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004158Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004159-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004160
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004161- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4162 division operators as per PEP 238.
4163
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004164Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004165-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004166
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004167- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4168 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4169 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4170 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4171
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004172C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004174
4175- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004176
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004177- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4178 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004179 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004180
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4182 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004183 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004184 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004185
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004186- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004187 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4188 module:
4189
4190 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004191
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004192 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4193 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004194
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004195 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4196 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004197
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004198 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4199
4200 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4201
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004202- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004203 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4204 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4205 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004206
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004207New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004208-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004209
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004210- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4211 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4212 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4213 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4214 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004215
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004216Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004218
4219Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004221
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004222- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4223 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4224 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4225 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004226 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4227 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4228 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4229 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4230 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004231
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004232- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004233 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4234
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004235
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004236What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4237===========================
4238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4240
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004241Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004243
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004244- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4245 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4246
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004247- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4248 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4249 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004250
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004251- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4252 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4253 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4254 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004255
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004256- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4257
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004259
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004260Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004262
4263- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004264 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004265 the module docstring for details.
4266
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004267Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004269
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004270- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004271 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4272 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4273 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004274
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004275- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4276 Nick Mathewson.
4277
4278Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004280
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004281- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4282 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4283 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4284 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4285 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4286 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4287 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4288 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4289
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004290- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4291 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4292 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4293 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4294
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004295- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4296 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4297 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4298 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4299 come a long way).
4300
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004301- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4302 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4303 write filters for these warnings).
4304
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004305- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4306 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4307 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4308 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4309 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4310
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004311- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4312 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4313 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4314 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4315 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4316 older distribution.
4317
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004318Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004319-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004320
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004321- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4322 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004323 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004324
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004325- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4326 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4327 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4328
4329- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4330
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004331- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4332
4333- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4334
4335- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4336
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004338
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004339- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4340
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004341New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004343
4344C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004346
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004347- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4348 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4349 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4350 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4351 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4352 against buffer overruns.
4353
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004354- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004355 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4356 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004357 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4358 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4359 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4360
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004361- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4362 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4363 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4364 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4365 deprecated.
4366
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004367Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004369
4370- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4371 relevant is found.
4372
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004373
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004374What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004375===========================
4376
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4378
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004379Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004380----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004381
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004382- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4383 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4384 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4385 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4386 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4387 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4388 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4389 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004390 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004391 repaired.
4392
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004393- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004394 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004395 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4396 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4397 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4398 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4399 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4400 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4401 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4402 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4403
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004404- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4405 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4406 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4407 leading BMO character).
4408
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004409- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4410 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4411 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4412
4413 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4414 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4415 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004416
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004417 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4418 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4419 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4420 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4421 for various simple to use conversions.
4422
4423 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4424 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4425
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4427 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4428 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4429 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4430 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4431 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4432 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4433 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4434 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4435 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4436 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4437 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4438 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4439 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4440 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004441
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004442- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4443 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4444 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004445 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004446 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004447
4448 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004449 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4450 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4451 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4452 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4453 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004454 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4455 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004456
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004457 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4458 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4459 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004460 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004461
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004462- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4463 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4464 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4465 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4466 floating arithmetic,
4467
4468 x = 9007199254740992.0
4469 print long(x)
4470
4471 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4472 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4473 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4474 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4475 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4476 functions are of good quality).
4477
4478 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4479 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4480 algorithms to break.
4481
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004482- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4483 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4484 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4485 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4486 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4487 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4488 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4489 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4490 order.
4491
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004492- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4493 operation along the most common code paths.
4494
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004495- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4496 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4497
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004498- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4499 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4500 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4501 {}.update(UserDict())
4502
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004503- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4504 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4505 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4506 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4507 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4508 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4509 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4510 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4511
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004512- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004513 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004515 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004516 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4517 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004518 join() method of strings
4519 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004520 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4521 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004523 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004524
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004525- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4526 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4527
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004528- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4529 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4530
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004531- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4532 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4533 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4534 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4535
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004536- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4537 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004538 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004539 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4540 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004541
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004542- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4543
4544
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004545Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004547
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004548- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004549 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004550 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4551 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4552
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004553- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4554 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4555
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004556- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4557 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4558 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4559 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4560
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004561- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4562 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4563 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4564
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004565- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4566
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004567- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4568
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004569- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4570 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4571 that are still imported into string.py).
4572
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004573- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4574
4575- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4576 Now it does.
4577
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004578- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4579
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004580- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4581 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4582 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4583 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4584 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004585 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4586 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004587
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004588- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4589 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4590 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4591 'help(object)'.
4592
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004593Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004595
4596- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004597 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004598 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4599 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4600
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004601- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004602 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4603 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004604
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004605C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004606-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004607
4608- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4609 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610
4611----
4612
4613**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**