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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
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000015- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
16 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
17 @staticmethod
18 def foo(bar):
19 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect this XXX before 2.4a2)
20
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000021- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
22 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
23 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
24 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
25 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
26 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
27 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
28 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
29 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
30 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
31 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
32
33 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
34 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
35 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
36 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
37 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
38 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
39 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
40
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000041- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
42 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
43
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000044- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000046
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000047- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000049 which was missing for no apparent reason.
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
53 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
54
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000055- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
56 types that support garbage collection.
57
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000058- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
59
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000060- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
61 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
62 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
63 Jython.
64
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000065- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
66
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000067Extension modules
68-----------------
69
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000070- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
71
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000072Library
73-------
74
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000075- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
76
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000077- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
78 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
79 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
80
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000081- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
82
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000083- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
84 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
85
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000086- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
87 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
88 when dummy_threading is being used.
89
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000090- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
91 from a tarfile.
92
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000093- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000094 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000095
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000096- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
97 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
98 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
99 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
100
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000101- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
102 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
103
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000104- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
105 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
106 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
107 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
108 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
109 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
110 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
111 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
112 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
113 by some other method in progress).
114
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000115- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
116 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
117 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000118
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000119- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
120
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000121- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
122 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
123 AM Kuchling.
124
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000125- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
126 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
127 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
128
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000129- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
130 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
131 instead of unsigned.
132
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000133- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000134 no longer part of the public API.
135
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000136- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
137 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
138 string methods of the same name).
139
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000140- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
141 SF patch 982681.
142
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000143- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000144 SF patch 945642.
145
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000146- doctest unittest integration improvements:
147
148 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
149
150 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
151 DocTestSuites.
152
153- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
154 that provide thread-local data.
155
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000156- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
157 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
158
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000159- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
160
161- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
162 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
163 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
164
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000165- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
166
167 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
168 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
169 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000170
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000171 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
172 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
173 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
174 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
175
176 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
177 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
178
179 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
180 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
181 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
182 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
183
184 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
185 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
186 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
187 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
188 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
189
190 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
191 wrapping help output.
192
193 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
194 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
195 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000196
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000197Tools/Demos
198-----------
199
200Build
201-----
202
203C API
204-----
205
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000206- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
207 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
208 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
209 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
210 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
211 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
212 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
213 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
214 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
215 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
216 its visible semantics have not changed.
217
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000218- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
219 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
220
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000221Documentation
222-------------
223
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000224- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000225
226 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
227 assigning thier values
228
229 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
230
231 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
232
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000233- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000234
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000235New platforms
236-------------
237
238Tests
239-----
240
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000241- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000242 platforms that use the Makefile.
243
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000244- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
245 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
246 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
247
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000248Windows
249-------
250
251Mac
252---
253
254
255
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000256What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
257=================================
258
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000259*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000260
261Core and builtins
262-----------------
263
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000264- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
265 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
266 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
267 objects now (one object instead of three).
268
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000269- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
270 Windows DLLs.
271
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000272- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
273 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000274
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000275- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
276 a new .pyc magic.
277
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000278- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
279 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
280 be there.
281
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000282- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
283 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
284 the LC_NUMERIC category.
285
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000286- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
287 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
288 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
289
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000290- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
291
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000292- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
293 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
294 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000295
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000296- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
297 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
298
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000299- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
300
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000301- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000302 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000303
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000304- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
305
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000306- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
307
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000308- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
309 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
310
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000311- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
312 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
313 Fixes bug #858016 .
314
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000315- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
316 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
317 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
318
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000319- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
320 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
321 improves their performance (about 35%).
322
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000323- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
324 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
325 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
326
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000327- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
328 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
329 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
330 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
331
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000332- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
333 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
334 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
335 length is not known).
336
337- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
338 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000339 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
340 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000341 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
342
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000343- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
344 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
345
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000346- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
347 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
348 keyword arguments.
349
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000350- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
351 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
352 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
353
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000354- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
355 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
356 cases.
357
358- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
359 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
360 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
361 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
362 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
363 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
364 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
365 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
366 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
367 a release build.
368
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000369- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
370 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
371
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000372- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000373 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000374
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000375- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
376 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
377 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
378 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
379 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
380 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
381 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
382 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
383 destroyed.
384
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000385- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
386 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
387 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
388 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
389 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
390 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
391 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
392 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
393
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000394- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
395 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
396 character other than a space.
397
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000398- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
399 by the function object or by the method object, the function
400 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
401 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
402 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
403 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
404 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
405 attributes with the same name.
406
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000407- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
408 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
409 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
410 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
411 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
412 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
413 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
414 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
415 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
416 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
417 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
418 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
419 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
420 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000421
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000422- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
423 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
424 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
425 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
426 This has been repaired.
427
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000428- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
429
430- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
431
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000432- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
433 over a sequence.
434
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000435- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000436 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000437
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000438- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
439
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000440- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
441 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
442 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
443 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
444 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
445 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
446 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
447 records with equal keys is unchanged).
448
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000449- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
450 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
451 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
452
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000453- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
454 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
455 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
456 freelist.
457
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000458- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
459 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
460
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000461- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
462 number.
463
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000464- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
465 a TypeError exception.
466
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000467- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
468 820195.
469
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000470- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
471 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
472 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
473
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000474- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000475 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
476 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000477
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000478- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
479 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
480 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
481
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000482- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
483 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000484 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000485
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000486- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000487 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
488 the first call.
489
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000490
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000491Extension modules
492-----------------
493
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000494- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
495 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
496
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000497- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
498 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
499 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
500 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
501 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
502 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
503 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000504
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000505- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
506
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000507- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
508
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000509- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
510 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
511
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000512- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
513 fewer false positives.
514
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000515- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
516 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
517
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000518- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000519 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
520
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000521- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000522 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000523 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
524 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
525 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000526
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000527- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
528 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
529 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
530 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
531
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000532- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
533 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
534 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
535 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
536 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
537 #897625.
538
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000539- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
540 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
541
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000542- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
543 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
544 and pops on either side of the deque.
545
546- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
547 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
548
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000549- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
550 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
551 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
552 other functions that expect a function argument.
553
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000554- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
555
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000556- os.getsid was added.
557
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000558- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
559 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
560 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
561
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000562- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
563
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000564- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
565
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000566- readline.clear_history was added.
567
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000568- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
569
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000570- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
571
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000572- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
573
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000574- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
575
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000576- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
577
578- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
579
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000580- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
581
582- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
583
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000584- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
585 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
586 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
587
588- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
589 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
590 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
591 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
592 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
593 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
594 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
595
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000596- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
597 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
598 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
599 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000600
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000601- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000602 iterators from a single iterable.
603
604- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
605 of raising a TypeError exception.
606
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000607- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
608 as parameter.
609
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000610Library
611-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000612
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000613- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
614 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
615 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000616
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000617- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
618 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
619 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000620
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000621- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000622
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000623- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
624 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000625
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000626- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
627 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
628
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000629- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
630
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000631- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000632 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000633
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000634- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
635 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
636
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000637- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
638
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000639- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
640 on cygwin and mingw32.
641
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000642- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
643
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000644- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
645 module.
646
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000647- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
648 installation scheme for all platforms.
649
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000650- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000651 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000652
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000653- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
654 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
655 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
656
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000657- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
658 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
659 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
660
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000661- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
662
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000663- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
664
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000665- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
666 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
667
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000668- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
669 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
670 type pattern with the same value exists.
671
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000672- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
673 when run from the command prompt).
674
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000675- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
676 not taken into consideration when caching value.
677
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000678- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
679 default sort).
680
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000681- Added global runctx function to profile module
682
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000683- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
684
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000685- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
686
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000687- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
688
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000689- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000690 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
691 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
692 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
693 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
694 accordingly.
695
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000696- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
697 decoding standards.
698
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000699- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
700 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
701 called for all requests.
702
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000703- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
704 they are passed to the compiler.
705
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000706- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
707 indent, width and depth.
708
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000709- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
710 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
711
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000712- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
713 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
714
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000715- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
716
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000717- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
718
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000719- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
720
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000721- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
722 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
723
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000724- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000725 for better performance.
726
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000727- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000728
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000729- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
730 a string).
731
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000732- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
733
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000734- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
735
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000736- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
737
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000738- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
739
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000740- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
741 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
742 list of fieldnames.
743
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000744- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
745 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
746
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000747- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
748
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000749- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
750 empty lists.
751
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000752- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
753 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
754 and shelves.
755
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000756- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
757 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
758
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000759- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000760 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
761 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000762
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000763- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
764 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000765 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000766
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000767- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000768 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
769 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
770
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000771- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
772 and removed in Py2.4.
773
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000774- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
775
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000776- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
777
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000778Tools/Demos
779-----------
780
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000781- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
782 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
783
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000784- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
785
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000786- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
787 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
788 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
789 destination in situations where both files are given.
790
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000791- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
792 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
793 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
794 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
795
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000796- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
797
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000798- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
799 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
800 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
801 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
802 now.
803
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000804- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
805 in effect
806
807- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
808 C-c C-h
809
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000810- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
811 -d option was given.
812
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000813Build
814-----
815
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000816- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
817 build under OS X.
818
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000819- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
820 --enable-profiling.
821
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000822- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
823 is configured --with-tsc.
824
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000825- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
826 on AMD64.
827
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000828- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
829 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
830
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000831- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
832 removed.
833
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000834- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
835 supported (see PEP 11).
836
837- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
838
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000839- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
840
841- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
842 (see PEP 11).
843
844- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
845 sizeof(char) must be 1.
846
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000847C API
848-----
849
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000850- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
851 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
852 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
853
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000854- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
855 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
856 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
857 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
858
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000859- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
860 generator objects.
861
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000862- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
863 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000864 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
865 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000866
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000867- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
868 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
869
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000870- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
871 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
872 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
873 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
874 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
875
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000876- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
877 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
878 about 10% faster.
879
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000880- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
881 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
882
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000883- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
884 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
885 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
886 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
887
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000888Windows
889-------
890
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000891- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
892 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
893 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
894 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
895
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000896- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
897 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
898 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
899
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000900
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000901What's New in Python 2.3 final?
902===============================
903
904*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
905
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000906IDLE
907----
908
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000909- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
910 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
911 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
912 context-menu actions.
913
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000914- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
915 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
916 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
917 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
918 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
919 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
920 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
921 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
922 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
923
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000924
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000925What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
926=============================================
927
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000928*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000929
930Core and builtins
931-----------------
932
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000933- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000934 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000935 comment at the end are still unsupported.
936
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000937Extension modules
938-----------------
939
940- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
941 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
942 than once. This has been fixed.
943
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000944- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
945 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
946 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
947 call.
948
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000949- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
950
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000951Library
952-------
953
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000954- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
955 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
956
957- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
958 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
959 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
960 restored.
961
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000962IDLE
963----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000964
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000965- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000966
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000967Build
968-----
969
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000970- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
971 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
972
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000973C API
974-----
975
976Windows
977-------
978
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000979- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
980 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
981
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000982- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
983
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000984Mac
985---
986
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000987- Various fixes to pimp.
988
989- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
990
991- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
992 more problems than it solves.
993
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000994
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000995What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
996=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000997
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000998*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
999
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001000Core and builtins
1001-----------------
1002
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001003- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1004 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1005
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001006- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1007 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001008 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001009
1010- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1011 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1012 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001013 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001014
1015- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1016 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001017
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001018- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1019 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1020 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1021
1022- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001023 770247.
1024
1025- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001026
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001027Extension modules
1028-----------------
1029
1030- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1031 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1032
1033- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1034
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001035- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1036
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001037- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1038 contained within the _strptime module.
1039
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001040- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1041 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1042
1043- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001044 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1045
1046- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1047 the find_class attribute, if present.
1048
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001049- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001050
1051 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1052 (SF bug 763298).
1053
1054 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001055 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1056 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1057 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001058
1059 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1060
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001061Library
1062-------
1063
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001064- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1065
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001066- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1067 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1068 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1069 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1070 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1071 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1072 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1073 or Tester().
1074
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001075- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1076 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1077 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1078 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1079 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1080 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1081 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1082 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1083 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001084
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001085 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001086
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001087- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1088 weren't before was an oversight.
1089
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001090- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1091 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1092
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001093- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1094 when there are no lines.
1095
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001096- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1097 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1098
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001099- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1100 to child processes.
1101
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001102- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1103
1104- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1105
1106- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1107 xmlrpclib.
1108
1109- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1110 responses.
1111
1112- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1113 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1114
1115- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1116 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1117 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1118
1119- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1120 used as patterns.
1121
1122- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1123 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1124 than Tk 8.3.
1125
1126- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1127
1128- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001129
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001130Tools/Demos
1131-----------
1132
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001133- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1134
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001135- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1136
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001137- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001138
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001139Build
1140-----
1141
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001142- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1143
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001144- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1145
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001146- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1147 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001148
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001149- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1150 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1151 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001152
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001153C API
1154-----
1155
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001156- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1157 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1158
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001159Windows
1160-------
1161
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001162- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1163 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1164 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1165 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1166 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1167 Python exception ::
1168
1169 thread.error: can't start new thread
1170
1171 is raised now.
1172
1173- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1174 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1175 instead of from DLL teardown.
1176
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001177Mac
1178---
1179
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001180- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001181 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001182 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1183 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1184 the executable in the bundle.
1185
1186- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001187
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001188- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1189
1190- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1191 on Panther.
1192
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001193What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1194================================
1195
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001196*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001197
1198Core and builtins
1199-----------------
1200
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001201- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1202 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1203 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1204 with the -i option.
1205
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001206- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1207 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1208
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001209- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1210 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1211
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001212- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1213 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1214 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1215 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1216 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1217 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1218 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1219 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1220 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1221 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1222 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1223 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1224 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001225
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001226- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1227 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1228 embedded in a lambda expression.
1229
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001230- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1231 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1232 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1233 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1234 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1235
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001236- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1237 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1238 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1239
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001240- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1241 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1242
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001243- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1244 It's writable again.
1245
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001246- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1247 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1248 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001249 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001250
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001251- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1252 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1253 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1254
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001255Extension modules
1256-----------------
1257
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001258- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1259 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1260
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001261- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1262 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1263 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1264 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1265
1266- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1267 collection.
1268
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001269- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1270 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1271 unique within a single program run.
1272
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001273- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1274 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1275
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001276- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1277 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1278
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001279- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1280 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001281
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001282- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1283
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001284- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1285 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1286
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001287- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1288 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1289 for many BSD-derived systems.
1290
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001291
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001292Library
1293-------
1294
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001295- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1296 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1297 primary ones:
1298
1299 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1300 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1301 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1302
1303 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1304 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1305 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1306 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1307 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1308 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1309
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001310- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1311 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1312 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1313 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1314 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1315 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1316 argument.
1317
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001318- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1319 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1320 in the archive.
1321
1322- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1323 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1324
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001325- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1326 569574).
1327
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001328- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1329 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1330 no more.
1331
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001332- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1333 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1334 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1335 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1336 code coverage.
1337
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001338- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1339 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1340 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001341 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1342 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001343
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001344- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1345 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1346 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001347 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001348
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001349- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1350
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001351- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1352 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1353 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1354 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1355
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001356- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1357 handling.
1358
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001359- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1360 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1361
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001362- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1363 in socket.py.
1364
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001365- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1366
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001367- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1368 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1369 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1370 opener with proxy support.
1371
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001372- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1373
1374- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1375
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001376Tools/Demos
1377-----------
1378
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001379- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1380
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001381- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1382
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001383- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1384 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001385
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001386- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1387 files.
1388
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001389Build
1390-----
1391
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001392- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001393 different root directory.
1394
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001395C API
1396-----
1397
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001398- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1399 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1400 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1401 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1402 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1403 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1404 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1405 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1406 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1407 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1408
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001409- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1410 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1411 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1412 from Python.
1413
1414
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001415New platforms
1416-------------
1417
1418None this time.
1419
1420Tests
1421-----
1422
1423- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1424 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1425
1426Windows
1427-------
1428
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001429- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1430
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001431- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1432 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1433 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1434 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1435 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1436 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1437 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1438 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1439 that's what it's for.
1440
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001441Mac
1442---
1443
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001444- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1445 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1446 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1447 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001448- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1449 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1450- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001451
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001452SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1453------------------------------------
1454
1455430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1456598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1457622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1458661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1459683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1460697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1461713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1462724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1463727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1464729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1465730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1466731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1467732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1468733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1469735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1470740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1471744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1472745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1473747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1474749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1475751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1476753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1477755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1478757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1479760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1480
1481
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001482What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1483================================
1484
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001485*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001486
1487Core and builtins
1488-----------------
1489
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001490- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1491 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1492
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001493- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1494 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1495 and cannot be strings).
1496
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001497- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1498 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1499 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1500 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1501
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001502- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1503 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1504 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1505 Python itself.
1506
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001507- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1508 the referenced object, if it has one.
1509
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001510- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1511 the thread started at
1512 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1513
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001514- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1515 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1516 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1517 placed on a list index.
1518
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001519- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1520 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1521 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1522 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1523
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001524- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1525 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1526 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1527 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1528 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1529 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1530 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1531
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001532- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1533 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1534 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1535 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1536 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1537
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001538- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1539 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001540
1541- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1542 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1543 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1544 #693195.)
1545
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001546- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1547 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001548
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001549- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001550 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001551 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1552 interpreter executions, would fail.
1553
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001554- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001555 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001556 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001557
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001558Extension modules
1559-----------------
1560
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001561- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1562 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1563 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1564 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1565
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001566- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1567 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1568
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001569- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1570 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1571 and Greg Chapman.)
1572
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001573- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1574 recursively.
1575
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001576- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001577 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1578 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1579 leaks.
1580
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001581- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1582
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001583- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1584 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1585 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1586 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1587 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1588 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1589 #705836.
1590
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001591- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001592 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1593
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001594- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1595 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1596 See SF bug #692416.
1597
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001598- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1599 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1600
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001601- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1602 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1603 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001604
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001605- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001606 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1607 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1608
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001609- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1610 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1611 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1612 timeouts to work properly.
1613
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001614Library
1615-------
1616
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001617- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1618 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1619 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1620 future release.
1621
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001622- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1623 for querying platform dependent features.
1624
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001625- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001626
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001627- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1628 pickle protocol versions.
1629
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001630- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1631 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1632 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1633
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001634- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1635
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001636- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1637 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1638 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1639 modules.
1640
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001641- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1642 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1643 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1644
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001645- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1646 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1647
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001648- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1649 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1650 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1651
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001652- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001653 MS Office extensions.
1654
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001655- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1656 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1657
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001658- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1659 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1660
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001661- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1662 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1663 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1664 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1665 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1666 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1667
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001668- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1669 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1670 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001671
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001672- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1673 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1674 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1675
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001676- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1677
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001678- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1679 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1680 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1681
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001682Tools/Demos
1683-----------
1684
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001685- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1686 See the module docstring for details.
1687
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001688Build
1689-----
1690
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001691- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1692 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001693
1694C API
1695-----
1696
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001697- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1698
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001699- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1700 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1701 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1702
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001703- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1704 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001705
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001706 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1707 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1708 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001709
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001710- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001711 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1712
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001713- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1714 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1715 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001716
1717New platforms
1718-------------
1719
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001720None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001721
1722Tests
1723-----
1724
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001725- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1726 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001727
1728Windows
1729-------
1730
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001731- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1732 function.
1733
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001734- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1735 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001736
1737Mac
1738---
1739
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001740- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1741 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001742
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001743- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1744 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001745
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001746- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1747 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1748 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001749
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001750- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001751 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1752 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001753
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001754- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1755 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001756
1757
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001758What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1759=================================
1760
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001761*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001762
1763Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001764-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001765
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001766- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1767 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1768 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1769
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001770- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1771 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1772 (SF patch #664376.)
1773
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001774- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1775 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1776 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1777 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1778 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1779 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001780 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001781
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001782- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1783 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1784 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1785 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001786 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001787
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001788- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1789 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1790 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1791 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1792 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1793 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1794 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1795 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1796 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1797 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1798 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1799
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001800- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1801 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1802 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1803 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1804 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1805 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1806
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001807- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1808 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1809
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001810- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1811 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1812 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1813 case.)
1814
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001815- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1816 passed as unicode strings.
1817
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001818- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1819 See SF bug #683467.
1820
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001821- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1822 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1823
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001824- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1825
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001826- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1827
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001828- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1829 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1830 arguments.
1831
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001832- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1833 See SF bug #667147.
1834
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001835- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001836 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001837 See SF bug #676155.
1838
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001839- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001840 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001841 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1842 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1843 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1844 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1845 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1846 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001847
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001848Extension modules
1849-----------------
1850
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001851- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1852 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1853 tp_as_number pointer.
1854
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001855- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1856 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1857 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1858 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1859 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1860
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001861- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1862
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001863- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1864
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001865- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001866 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001867 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1868 patch #678531.)
1869
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001870- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1871 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1872
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001873- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1874 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1875
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001876- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1877
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001878- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1879 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1880 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1881
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001882- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1883
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001884- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1885 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1886
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001887- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001888
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001889- datetime changes:
1890
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001891 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1892
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001893 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1894 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1895 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1896 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1897 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1898 now.
1899
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001900 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001901 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1902 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001903
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001904 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001905 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001906 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1907 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1908 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1909 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001910
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001911 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1912 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1913 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001914 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1915
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001916 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1917 by a later example coded by Guido.
1918
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001919 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001920 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1921 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1922 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001923 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1924 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1925
1926 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1927 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1928 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1929 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1930 tzinfo subclass instance.
1931
1932 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1933 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1934 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1935 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1936 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1937 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1938 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1939 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001940
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001941 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1942 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1943 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1944 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1945 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001946 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1947
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001948 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001949
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001950 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1951 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1952 as a naive datetime object.
1953
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001954 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1955 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1956 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1957
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001958 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1959 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1960 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1961 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1962 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1963 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1964 comparison.
1965
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001966 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1967 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1968 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1969 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001970 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001971
1972 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001973
1974 and ::
1975
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001976 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1977
1978 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1979 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1980 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1981 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1982
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001983 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1984 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1985 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1986 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1987 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1988
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001989 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1990 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001991 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1992 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001993
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001994Library
1995-------
1996
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001997- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1998 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1999
2000- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2001 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2002 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2003 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2004 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2005 See PEP 307 for details.
2006
2007- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2008 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2009
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002010- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2011 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002012 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002013 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2014 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002015 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002016
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002017- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2018 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2019
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002020- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2021 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2022 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2023
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002024- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2025
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002026- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2027 exception.
2028
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002029- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2030 class.
2031
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002032- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2033 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2034 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2035
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002036- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2037 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2038
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002039- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002040 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2041 See SF bug #659228.
2042
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002043- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2044 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2045 See SF patch #651082.
2046
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002047- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002048
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002049- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2050 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2051
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002052- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002053 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002054
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002055- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2056 DOS paths from other platforms.
2057
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002058Tools/Demos
2059-----------
2060
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002061- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2062 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2063 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2064 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2065 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2066 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2067 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2068 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2069 example:
2070
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002071 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2072 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002073
2074 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2075
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002076
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002077Build
2078-----
2079
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002080- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2081 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2082 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002083 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2084
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002085 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2086
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002087- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2088 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2089 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2090 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2091 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2092 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2093 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2094 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2095 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2096
2097- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2098 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2099 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2100 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2101
2102- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2103 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2104
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002105C API
2106-----
2107
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002108- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2109 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002110
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002111- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2112 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2113 tp_as_number pointer.
2114
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002115- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2116 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2117 (SF #681367)
2118
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002119- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2120 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2121 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2122 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002123
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002124Tests
2125-----
2126
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002127- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002128 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2129 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2130 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2131 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2132 pydoc.)
2133
2134- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2135
2136- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002137
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002138Windows
2139-------
2140
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002141- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2142 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2143 time).
2144
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002145- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2146 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2147
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002148- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2149 release without strong cryptography.
2150
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002151- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002152 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002153
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002154- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2155 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2156
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002157Mac
2158---
2159
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002160- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2161 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002162
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002163- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2164 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2165 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002166
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002167- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2168 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002169
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002170- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2171 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2172 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2173 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002174
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002175- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002176 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2177 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2178 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002179
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002180
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002181What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002182=================================
2183
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002184*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002185
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002186Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002187--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002188
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002189- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2190
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002191- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2192 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002193 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002194 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002195 a different meaning than before.
2196
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002197- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002198 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002199 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002200
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002201- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002202 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002203 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002204
2205- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2206 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2207 and deallocation.
2208
2209- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2210 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2211
2212- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2213 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2214 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2215 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2216 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2217
2218- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2219 now detected by the garbage collector.
2220
2221- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2222 [SF bug 519621]
2223
2224- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2225 identifier.
2226
2227- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2228 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2229 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2230 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2231 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2232 [SF bug 563060]
2233
2234- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2235 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2236 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2237 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2238 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2239
2240- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2241 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2242 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2243
2244- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2245
2246- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2247 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2248 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2249 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2250 state of the slots would be lost.)
2251
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002252Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002253-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002254
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002255- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002256 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2257 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2258 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2259 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002260 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2261 Jython 2.1.
2262
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002263- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002264 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002265 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2266 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2267 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2268 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2269 these, see PEP 302.
2270
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002271- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2272 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2273 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2274
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002275- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2276 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2277 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2278
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002279- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2280 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2281 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2282
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002283- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2284 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2285 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2286 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2287 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2288 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2289 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2290 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2291 releases or implementations.
2292
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002293- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002294 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2295 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002296
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002297- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2298 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2299
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002300- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2301 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2302 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2303
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002304- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2305 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2306
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002307- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2308 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002309 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2310 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002311
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002312- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2313 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2314 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2315 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2316 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2317
2318 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2319 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2320 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2321 pattern.
2322
2323 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2324 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2325 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2326 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2327
2328 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2329 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2330 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2331 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2332 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2333 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2334
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002335- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2336 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2337 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2338 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2339 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2340 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2341 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2342 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002343
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002344- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2345 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2346 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2347 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2348 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002349 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2350 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2351 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2352 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2353 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2354 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2355 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002356
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002357- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2358 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2359
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002360- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2361 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2362 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2363 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2364 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2365 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2366 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2367 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2368 to Zack Weinberg!
2369
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002370- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2371 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2372 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2373 type. This has been fixed now.
2374
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002375- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2376 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2377 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2378
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002379- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2380 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2381 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2382 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2383 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2384 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2385 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2386 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002387 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002388
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002389- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2390 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2391 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002392
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002393- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2394 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2395 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2396 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2397 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2398 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2399 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2400 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002401 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002402 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2403 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2404
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002405- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2406 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2407 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2408 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2409 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2410 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2411 this.)
2412
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002413- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2414 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002415 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002416 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002417 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2418 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002419 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2420 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002421
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002422- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2423 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2424 currently running.
2425
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002426- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2427 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2428 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2429 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2430
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002431- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2432 as directory names.
2433
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002434- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2435 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2436
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002437- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2438 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2439
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002440- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002441 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2442 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002443
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002444- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2445 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2446 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2447 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2448 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2449
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002450- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2451 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2452 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2453 removed.
2454
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002455- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2456 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2457 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2458
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002459- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2460 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2461 to __debug__.
2462
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002463- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2464 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2465 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2466
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002467- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2468 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2469 deprecated now.
2470
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002471- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2472 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2473 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002474
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002475- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2476 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2477 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2478 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2479 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002480
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002481- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2482 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2483
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002484- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2485 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2486 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002487 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002488 is backward compatible.
2489
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002490- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2491 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2492 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2493 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2494 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2495
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002496- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2497 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2498 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2499 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2500 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2501 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002502
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002503- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2504 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2505
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002506- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2507 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2508
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002509- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2510 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2511 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2512 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2513 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2514
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002515- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2516 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2517 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2518
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002519- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002520 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2521
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002522- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2523 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2524 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002525
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002526- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2527 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2528
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002529- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2530 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2531 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2532
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002533- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2534
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002535Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002536-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002537
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002538- Added three operators to the operator module:
2539 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2540 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2541 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2542
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002543- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2544
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002545- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2546 archives.
2547
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002548- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2549 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2550 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2551
2552 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2553
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002554- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2555 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2556 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002557 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002558
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002559- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2560 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2561 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2562 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002563 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2564 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2565 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2566 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002567
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002568- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2569 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002570
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002571- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2572
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002573- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2574 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2575
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002576- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2577 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2578 supported.
2579
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002580- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2581
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002582- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2583 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002584
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002585- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2586 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2587
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002588- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2589
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002590- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2591 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2592
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002593- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2594 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2595 functions but callable type objects.
2596
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002597- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002598 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002599 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002600
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002601- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2602 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002603
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002604- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2605 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002606
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002607- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2608 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2609 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2610 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2611
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002612- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2613 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002614
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002615- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2616 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2617 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2618 and __imul__.
2619
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002620- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002621 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2622 is called.
2623
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002624- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2625 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2626 interpreter was compiled.
2627
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002628- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2629 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2630 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002631 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002632 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2633 1, not 2.
2634
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002635- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2636 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2637 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2638 limit.
2639
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002640- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2641 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2642 bug #623464.
2643
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002644- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2645 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2646 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2647 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2648
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002649Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002650-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002651
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002652- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2653
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002654- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2655 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2656 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2657 with Python 2.3a2.
2658
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002659- os.path exposes getctime.
2660
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002661- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002662 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002663 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002664 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002665 unit tests of floating point results.
2666
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002667- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2668 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2669 has been increased.
2670
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002671- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2672 executed.
2673
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002674- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2675 postinstallation script.
2676
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002677- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2678 test the current module.
2679
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002680- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002681 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2682 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2683 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2684 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2685
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002686- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002687 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002688 Ward's Optik package.
2689
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002690- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2691 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2692 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2693 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2694
2695- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2696 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002697 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002698
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002699- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2700 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2701 shelf are binary pickles.
2702
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002703- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2704 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2705
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002706- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2707 modules are iterators now.
2708
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002709- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2710 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2711 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2712 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2713 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2714 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002715
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002716- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2717 with their entity value.
2718
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002719- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2720
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002721- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2722 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002723
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002724- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2725 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002726 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002727
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002728- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2729 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2730 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2731 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2732 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2733 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2734 main():
2735
2736 import locale
2737 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2738
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002739- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2740 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2741
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002742- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2743 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2744 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2745 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2746 to the new standard.
2747
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002748- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2749 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2750 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2751 an extension to the database.
2752
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002753- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2754 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2755 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2756 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002757 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002758
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002759- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002760 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002761
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002762- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2763 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2764 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2765 bounded integers.
2766
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002767- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2768 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2769 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2770 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2771 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2772 in existence.
2773
2774 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2775 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2776 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2777 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2778 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2779 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2780
2781 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2782 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2783 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2784 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2785
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002786- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2787 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2788 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2789
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002790- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2791
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002792- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2793 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2794 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2795 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2796
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002797- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2798 argument.
2799
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002800- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2801 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2802 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2803 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2804 [SF patch 560794].
2805
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002806- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2807 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2808 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002809 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2810 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2811 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002812
2813- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2814 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002815
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002816- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2817 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2818 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2819 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002820
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002821- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2822 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2823 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2824 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2825 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2826
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002827- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002828
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002829- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2830
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002831- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2832 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2833 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2834 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2835 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2836 identical to None.
2837
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002838- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2839 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2840 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2841 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2842 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2843 results now.
2844
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002845- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2846 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2847
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002848- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2849 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2850 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2851 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2852 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2853 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2854 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2855 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2856
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002857- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2858
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002859- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2860 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2861
2862- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2863 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2864 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2865 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2866 and other systems.
2867
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002868- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2869 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2870 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2871 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 +00002872 work well with these.
2873
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002874- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2875
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002876- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002877 connections.
2878
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002879- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2880 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2881 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2882
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002883- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2884 sets
2885
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002886- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2887 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2888 name.
2889
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002890- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2891 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2892 passed in.
2893
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002894- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002895 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002896 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2897 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002898
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002899- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2900
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002901- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2902
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002903- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2904 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2905 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2906
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002907- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2908 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2909 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2910 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002911 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002912
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002913- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002914 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002915 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002916
2917- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2918 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2919 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2920
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002921- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002922 the value of its expression argument.
2923
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002924- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2925 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2926 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2927
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002928- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2929 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2930 skipstone browser was included.
2931
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002932- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2933 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2934
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002935Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002937
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002938- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2939 names in addition to accepting file names.
2940
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002941- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2942 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2943 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2944 still used and useful.)
2945
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002946- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2947 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2948 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2949 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002950
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002951- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2952 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2953 the generated binary.
2954
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002955Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002956-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002957
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002958- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2959
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002960- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2961 except in the hands of experts.
2962
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002963- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002964 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2965 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2966 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002967
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002968- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2969 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2970 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2971 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2972 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2973 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2974 builds.
2975
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002976- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2977 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2978 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2979 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2980 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2981 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2982 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2983 new type.
2984
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002985- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002986
2987 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2988 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2989 positive infinities.
2990
2991 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2992 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2993 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2994 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2995 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2996 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2997 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2998
2999 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3000
3001 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3002
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003003- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3004 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3005 size of the executable.
3006
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003007- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3008 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3009 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3010 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003011
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003012- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3013
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003014- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3015 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3016 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003017
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003018- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3019 well as Unix.
3020
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003021- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3022 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3023 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3024 modules in the README file for details.
3025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003026C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003028
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003029- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3030 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003031 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003032 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003033 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003034
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003035- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3036 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3037 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3038 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3039 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3040 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003041 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003042 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3043 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3044 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3045 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3046 aligned.)
3047
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003048- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3049 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3050 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3051
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003052- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3053 level.
3054
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003055- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3056 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3057 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3058 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3059 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3060
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003061- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3062 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3063 code.
3064
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003065- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3066 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3067 adjusting for negative indices.
3068
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003069- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3070 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3071 object.
3072
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003073- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3074 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3075 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3076
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003077- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3078 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003079
3080- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3081
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003082- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3083 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3084 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3085 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3086
3087- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3088
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003089- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003090
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003091- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003092 without going through the buffer API.
3093
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003095
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003096- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3097 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3098 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3099 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3100
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003101- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3102 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3103
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003104- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003105 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3106
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003107New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003108-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003109
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003110- OpenVMS is now supported.
3111
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003112- AtheOS is now supported.
3113
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003114- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3115
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003116- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3117
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003118Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003119-----
3120
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003121- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3122 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3123 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003124
3125Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003127
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003128- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3129 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3130 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3131 bugs.
3132 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003133 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003134 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3135 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003136 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003137
3138- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003139 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003140
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003141- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3142 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3143
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003144- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3145 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003146 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003147 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3148
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003149- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3150 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3151 use files" uninstall option).
3152
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003153- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3154
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003155- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3156 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3157
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003158- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3159 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3160 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3161
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003162- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3163 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3164 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3165 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3166 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003167 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3168 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3169 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003170
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003171- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003172 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003173 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3174 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3175 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3176 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3177 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3178 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3179 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3180 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3181 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3182 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3183 work around.
3184
3185- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3186 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3187 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3188 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3189 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3190 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3191 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3192 specified with O_CREAT too).
3193
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003194Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195----
3196
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003197- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003198
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003199- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3200 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3201 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3202
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003203- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3204 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3205 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3206
3207- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3208 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3209 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3210 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3211 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3212 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3213 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3214 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003215
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003216- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3217 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3218 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003219
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003220- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3221 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3222 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3223 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3224 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003225
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003226- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3227 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3228 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003229
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003230- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3231 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003232
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003233- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3234 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3235 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3236 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3237 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003238
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003239- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3240 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3241 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3242
3243- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3244 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3245 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003246
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003247- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3248 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3249 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3250 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003251 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003252
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003253- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3254 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003255
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003256- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3257 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003258
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003259- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003260 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003261 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3262 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003263
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003264
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003265What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003266===============================
3267
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3269
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003270Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003272
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003273- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3274 with a custom metaclass.
3275
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003276Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003277-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003278
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003279- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3280 are proxies.
3281
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003282Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003283-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003284
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003285- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3286 very short strings.
3287
3288- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3289 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3290 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3291 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3292 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3293
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003294Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003296
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003297- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3298 close or delete time).
3299
3300- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3301 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3302
3303- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3304
3305- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003306 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003307
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003308Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003310
3311Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003313
3314C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003315-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003316
3317New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003318-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003319
3320Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003322
3323Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003324-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003325
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003326- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3327
3328- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3329 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3330
3331- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3332 deleted at process exit time.
3333
3334- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3335 in backslash.
3336
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003337Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003338----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003339
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003340- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3341 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3342 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3343
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003344
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003345What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003346===========================
3347
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3349
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003350Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003352
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003353- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3354 been extensively updated. See
3355
3356 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3357
3358 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3359
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003360- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3361 deleted!
3362
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003363- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3364 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3365 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3366 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3367 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3368
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003369- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3370
3371 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3372 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3373
3374 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3375 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3376 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3377 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3378 supported anyway.
3379
3380 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3381 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3382
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003383- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3384 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3385 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3386 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3387 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003388
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003389- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3390 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3391 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3392
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003393Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003395
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003396- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3397 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3398 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3399 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3400 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3401 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003402 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3403 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3404 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3405 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003406
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003407- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3408 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3409 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3410
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003411Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003412-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003413
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003414- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3415
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003416Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003418
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003419- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3420 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3421 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3422 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3423 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3424 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3425
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003426- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3427
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003428- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3429
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003430- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3431
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003432- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3433 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3434 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3435
3436- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3437
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003438Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003440
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003441- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3442 off a search on Google.
3443
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003444Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003446
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003447- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3448 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3449 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3450 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3451 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3452 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3453 other platforms should do likewise.
3454
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003455- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3456 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3457 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3458
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003459C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003460-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003461
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003462- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3463 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3464 producing key-value pairs.
3465
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003466- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003467 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003468 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3469 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3470 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3471 previously went unchallenged.
3472
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003473New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003474-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003475
3476Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003477-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003478
3479Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003480-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003481
3482Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003484
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003485- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3486 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003487
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003488- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3489 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3490 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3491 home.
3492
3493
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003494What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003495===========================
3496
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003497*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003499Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003500--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003501
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003502- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3503 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003504
3505 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003506 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003507
3508 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3509 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003510 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003511 This needs to be documented.
3512
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003513- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3514 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3515
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003516- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3517 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3518 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3519
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003520- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3521 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3522
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003523- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3524 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3525 class forbids it).
3526
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003527- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3528 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3529 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3530
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003531- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3532
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003533Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003535
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003536- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3537 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003538 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003539
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003540- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3541 (like 1 + '').
3542
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003543Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003545
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003546- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3547 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3548 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3549 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003550 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003551 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3552
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003553- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3554 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3555 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3556 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3557
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003558- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3559 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003560 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3561 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3562 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003563
3564- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3565 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003566
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003567- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3568 bytes on its input.
3569
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003570Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003572
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003573- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003574 convenience function.
3575
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003576- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3577 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3578 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003579 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3580 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3581 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3582 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3583 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3584 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003585
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003586- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3587 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3588 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3589 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3590
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003591- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3592 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3593 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3594
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003595- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3596 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3597 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3598 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3599
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003600- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3601 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003602 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003603 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3604 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3605 new -l and -e options.
3606
3607- statcache is now deprecated.
3608
3609- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3610 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003612 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3613 time properly taken into account.
3614
3615- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3616 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3617 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3618 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3619
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003620Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003622
3623Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003625
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003626- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3627 is built with libdb3 if available.
3628
3629- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3630
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003631C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003632-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003633
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003634- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3635 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3636 PySequence_Size().
3637
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003638- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3639
3640- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3641 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3642 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3643
3644- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3645 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3646
3647- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3648 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3649
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003650New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003652
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003653- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3654 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3655
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003656- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3657 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3658
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003659- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3660
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003661Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003663
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003664- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3665 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3666
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003667Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003668-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003669
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003670Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003672
3673- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3674 removed completely in the next release.
3675
3676- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3677 OSX.
3678
3679- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3680 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3681
3682- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3683
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003684
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003685What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003686===========================
3687
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3689
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003690Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003692
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003693- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003694 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003695 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003696 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3697 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003698 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3699 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003700 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3701 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003702
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003703- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3704 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3705
3706- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3707 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3708
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003709Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003711
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003712- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3713 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3714 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3715 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3716 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3717 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3718 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3719 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3720
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003721- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3722 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3723 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3724 example).
3725
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003726- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003727 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003728 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003729 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003730
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003731- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3732 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3733 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003734 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003735
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003736- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3737 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3738 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3739 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3740 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3741 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3742
3743 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3744
3745 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3746
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003747Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003749
3750- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3751
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003752- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3753
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003754- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3755 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003756
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003757- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3758 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3759 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3760 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3761 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3762 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003763 attributes.
3764
3765- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3766 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3767 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003768
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003769- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3770 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3771 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003772
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003773- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3774 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3775 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003776 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3777 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3778
3779- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3780 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003781
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003782Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003784
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003785- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3786 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3787
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003788- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3789 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3790 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3791 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3792
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003793- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3794 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3795 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3796 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3797
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003798 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3799 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3800 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3801 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3802 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3803 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3804 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3805 without losing information).
3806
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003807- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003808 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3809 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3810 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3811 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3812 module).
3813
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003814 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003815 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3816 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3817 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3818 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003819
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003820- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003821 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3822 encoding.
3823
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003824- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3825 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3826
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003827- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003828 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3829
3830- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3831 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3832 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3833 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3834
3835- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3836
3837- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3838 ON, and OFF.
3839
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003840- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3841 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3842
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003843Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003845
3846- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3847 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3848 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003849
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003850- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3851 been added: -X and -E.
3852
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003853Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003855
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003856- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3857 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3858
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003859C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003861
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003862- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3863 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3864 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3865 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3866 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3867
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003868- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3869 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3870 as long) arguments.
3871
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003872- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3873 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3874 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3875 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3876 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3877 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3878
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003879- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3880 input.
3881
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003882New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003883-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003884
3885Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003887
3888Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003890
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003891- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3892 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3893 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3894
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003895- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3896 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3897 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003898 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3901 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3902 import signal
3903 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003904
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003906 while 1:
3907 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003909 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3910 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3911 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3912 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003913
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003914
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003915What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3916===========================
3917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3919
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003920Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003921--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003922
3923- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3924 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3925 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3926
3927- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3928 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3929 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3930 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3931 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3932 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3933 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003934
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003935- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003936 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003937 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3938 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3939 associate a docstring with a property.
3940
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003941- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3942 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3943 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3944 other built-in object types.
3945
3946- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3947 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3948 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3949 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3950 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3951
3952- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3953 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3954
3955- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3956 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003957 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003958 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3959 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3960 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3961 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3962 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3963
3964- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3965 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3966 class.
3967
3968- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3969 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3970 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3971 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3972
3973- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3974 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3975 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3976 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3977
3978- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3979 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3980
3981- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3982 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3983 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3984 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3985 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003986 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003987 with the same value as s.
3988
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003989- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3990
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003991Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003993
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003994- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3995
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003996- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3997 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3998 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3999 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4000 objects.
4001
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004002- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4003 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004004 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4005 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4006
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004007- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4008 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4009 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4010
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004011Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004012-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004013
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004014- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4015 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4016 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4017 by the instances.
4018
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004019- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4020 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4021 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4022
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004023- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4024 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4025 before the entire comparison is complete.
4026
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004027- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4028 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4029 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4030
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004031- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4032 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4033 getwriter().
4034
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004035- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4036 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4037
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004038- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004039 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4040 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4041
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004042- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4043 iterable object.
4044
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004045- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4046 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004047
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004048- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4049 authentication.
4050
4051- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4052 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004053
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004054- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004055 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4056 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4057 a sample driver.)
4058
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004059Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004060-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004061
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004062- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4063 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4064 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4065 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4066 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4067 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4068 kernel has large file support.
4069
4070- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4071 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4072 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4073 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4074 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4075
4076- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4077 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4078 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4079
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004080C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004082
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004083- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4084 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4085
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004086New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004088
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004089- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4090 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4091
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004092Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004094
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004095- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4096 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4097 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4098 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4099 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4100
4101- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4102 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4103 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4104 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4105
4106- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4107 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4108
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004109Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004111
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004112- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004113 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4114 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004115
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004116
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004117What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4118===========================
4119
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4121
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004122Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004124
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004125- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4126 big to represent as a C double.
4127
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004128- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4129 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4130 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4131 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4132 restriction).
4133
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004134- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4135 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4136 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4137 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4138 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4139
4140 >>> dir([])
4141 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4142 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4143 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4144 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4145 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4146 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4147 'reverse', 'sort']
4148
4149 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4150
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004151- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004152 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4153 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4154 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4155 OverflowError exception.
4156
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004157- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004158 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004159 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4160 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4161 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4162 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4163 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004164 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004165 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4166 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4167
4168 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4169 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4170 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4171 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004172
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004173- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004174 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4175 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4176 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4177 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4178 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4179 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4180 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4181 once it is created.
4182
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004183- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4184 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4185 (key, value) pairs.
4186
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004187- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004188 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4189 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4190
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004191- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4192 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4193 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4194 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4195 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004197- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004198 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4199 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4200
4201 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4202
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004203- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004204 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4205
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004206Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004208
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004209- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004210 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4211 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004212
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004213- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4214 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4215 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4216 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4217 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4218 in this area anymore).
4219
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004220- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4221 threading.Timer.
4222
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004223- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4224 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4225
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004226- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004227 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4228
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004229- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004230 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4231 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4232 converted to Python longs.
4233
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004234- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004235 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4236
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004237- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4238 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4239 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4240
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004241Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004243
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004244- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4245 division operators as per PEP 238.
4246
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004247Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004249
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004250- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4251 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4252 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4253 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4254
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004255C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004256-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004257
4258- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004259
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004260- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4261 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004262 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004263
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4265 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004266 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004268
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004269- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004270 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4271 module:
4272
4273 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004274
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004275 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4276 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004277
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004278 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4279 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004280
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004281 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4282
4283 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4284
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004285- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004286 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4287 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4288 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004289
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004290New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004292
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004293- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4294 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4295 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4296 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4297 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004298
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004299Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004301
4302Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004304
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004305- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4306 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4307 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4308 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004309 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4310 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4311 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4312 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4313 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004314
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004315- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004316 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4317
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004318
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004319What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4320===========================
4321
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4323
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004324Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004326
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004327- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4328 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4329
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004330- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4331 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4332 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004333
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004334- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4335 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4336 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4337 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004338
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004339- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4340
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004342
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004343Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004345
4346- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004347 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004348 the module docstring for details.
4349
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004350Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004351-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004352
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004353- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004354 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4355 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4356 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004357
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004358- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4359 Nick Mathewson.
4360
4361Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004363
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004364- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4365 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4366 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4367 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4368 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4369 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4370 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4371 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4372
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004373- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4374 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4375 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4376 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4377
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004378- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4379 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4380 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4381 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4382 come a long way).
4383
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004384- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4385 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4386 write filters for these warnings).
4387
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004388- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4389 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4390 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4391 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4392 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4393
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004394- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4395 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4396 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4397 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4398 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4399 older distribution.
4400
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004401Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004403
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004404- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4405 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004406 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004407
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004408- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4409 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4410 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4411
4412- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4413
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004414- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4415
4416- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4417
4418- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4419
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004420- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004421
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004422- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4423
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004424New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004426
4427C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004429
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004430- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4431 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4432 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4433 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4434 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4435 against buffer overruns.
4436
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004437- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004438 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4439 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004440 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4441 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4442 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4443
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004444- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4445 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4446 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4447 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4448 deprecated.
4449
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004450Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004451-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004452
4453- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4454 relevant is found.
4455
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004456
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004457What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004458===========================
4459
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4461
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004462Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004464
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004465- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4466 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4467 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4468 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4469 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4470 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4471 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4472 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004473 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004474 repaired.
4475
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004476- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004477 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004478 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4479 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4480 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4481 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4482 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4483 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4484 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4485 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4486
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004487- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4488 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4489 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4490 leading BMO character).
4491
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004492- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4493 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4494 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4495
4496 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4497 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4498 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004499
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004500 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4501 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4502 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4503 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4504 for various simple to use conversions.
4505
4506 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4507 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4508
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4510 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4511 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4512 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4513 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4514 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4515 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4516 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4517 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4518 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4519 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4520 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4521 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4522 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4523 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004524
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004525- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4526 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4527 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004528 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004529 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004530
4531 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004532 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4533 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4534 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4535 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4536 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004537 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4538 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004539
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004540 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4541 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4542 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004543 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004544
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004545- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4546 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4547 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4548 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4549 floating arithmetic,
4550
4551 x = 9007199254740992.0
4552 print long(x)
4553
4554 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4555 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4556 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4557 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4558 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4559 functions are of good quality).
4560
4561 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4562 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4563 algorithms to break.
4564
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004565- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4566 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4567 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4568 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4569 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4570 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4571 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4572 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4573 order.
4574
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004575- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4576 operation along the most common code paths.
4577
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004578- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4579 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4580
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004581- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4582 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4583 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4584 {}.update(UserDict())
4585
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004586- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4587 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4588 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4589 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4590 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4591 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4592 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4593 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4594
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004595- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004596 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004598 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004599 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4600 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004601 join() method of strings
4602 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004603 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4604 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004605 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004606 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004607
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004608- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4609 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4610
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004611- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4612 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4613
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004614- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4615 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4616 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4617 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4618
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004619- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4620 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004621 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004622 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4623 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004624
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004625- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4626
4627
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004628Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004630
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004631- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004632 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004633 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4634 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4635
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004636- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4637 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4638
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004639- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4640 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4641 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4642 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4643
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004644- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4645 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4646 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4647
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004648- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4649
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004650- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4651
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004652- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4653 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4654 that are still imported into string.py).
4655
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004656- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4657
4658- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4659 Now it does.
4660
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004661- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4662
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004663- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4664 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4665 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4666 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4667 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004668 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4669 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004670
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004671- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4672 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4673 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4674 'help(object)'.
4675
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004676Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004678
4679- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004680 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004681 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4682 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4683
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004684- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004685 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4686 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004687
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004688C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004690
4691- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4692 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693
4694----
4695
4696**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**